Interior Structure

Here is the interior of the boat. There is a bit more work to do here, but its getting pretty close to done. Once the interior is done all I need to do is put the deck on. I could do that pretty soon, but I'll probably leave it off till I get more parts finished, cuz once its on, there is no opening it up again.


In the middle of the boat you'll see the daggerboard box. The box is made out of plywood with a layer of carbon inside of the box for added strength. Note the tabs along the end of the box (they are covered with a bit epoxy). I made the box with these tabs on both side so that the box could be assembled with precision inside the boat and then bogged in place. As anyone who's worked with epoxy knows, lining up parts can be tough when gluing multple pieces together. The tabs on the box were aligned precisely so that it could only fit together one way.

You'll also notice that the box is slightly larger than it needs to be. Infact its 1" x 8" which is much larger than any modern daggerboard. But since I don't have the foils yet I made the box larger than necessary so that I can finish the boat without having my foils and know that I can make anything fit. Once I get the foils I'll make and insert for the box that will exactly fit the foils. This way I can also change foils in the future without much trouble.

The 11'3'' Moth

Here is the bow of mothball1. How did the end get blunted so well? Originally the boat was 11'3'' by design, even though the hull can only be 11' 0'' by class rules. In order to keep the lines constant I made the boat slightly longer and then inserted a shaped piece of wood at 11' exactly and then cut the last three inches of the hull off. This will make a very tough and nicely rounded nose without changing the lines of the boat. I think it looks pretty good. a sharper nose may be slightly faster, but its also more vulnerable and decreases the volume in the front of the boat. One of the realities of the hydrofoil boat is that maximizing displacement mode boat speed is silly. Once you start to exceed hullspeed you will by on the foils so it doesn't really matter how fast you can go while lowriding. Its better to make the hull more functional for lower speeds than maximizing displacement boatspeed.

Home Sweet Home

This was a good weekend for Mothball1. Not only do we have some of the internal bulkhead bogged in place and the deck shaped, but I also transported the boat back to my house. The ride home was a bit more eventful than I was hoping. About ten minutes after we left with the boat on top of the car we drove through a fairly large rain and hail storm. There was nothing we could do about it so we just kept driving hoping it wouldn't damage the raw wood on the hull too much. After we stopped I inspected the boat and found no hail or water damage at all. Yay!

Having the boat at home should speed up the construction process considerably. There is still lots to do, but with the boat in the garage I should be able to spend a lot more time working on it. I spent a bit of time sanding on the bottom of the hull and it turns out that the major screw-up that I did at the beginning of the project isn't going to take that much to fix. A bit of sanding and some filler should fix most of the problem areas. The boat should begin looking very Mothish over the next few weeks.