Almost There

Did a lot of work on the boat this weekend and I'm happy to say that its getting pretty close to done. This weekend I sewed the tramps, faired the hull, got the rudder adjuster up and running, made progress on the rudder gantry, and started the daggerboard box. There is some finish work to be done on all of this stuff, but I'm happy with where everything is. The only outstanding item is that I still do not have the 2mm push rod for the daggerboard flap. I may end up needing to build one, but that wouldn't be too tough. I'll work on getting some pictures up tomorrow.

28 lbs

Weight is everything on the moth. Heavy things don't fly. I've been trying to get a handle on the boat weight for a while but frankly I couldn't find a good way to accurately measure it, until today. With the aid of a few pulleys and some weights I was able to suspend the boat and check the hull weight. It turns out the total weight of the mostly finished hull is 28 lbs. I still need to do a bit of fairing and paint it, but 28 lbs is actually quite good for a home-built plywood hull. It is about 10 lbs heavier than the Mach 2 (~18 lb), but its significantly lighter than the Bladerider FX (~40 lb). This thing may actually fly.

Getting Closer

So I have been slowly progressing on this thing, but running a business, taking care of a two-year old, getting a keel boat ready to race, planning a national regatta, and building a Moth takes a lot of time. I'm not complaining, its all fun, its just hard to focus on one thing. Anyway, here's were we are. I have almost all of the parts finished for the rudder and tiller assembly. The rig is pretty much done. The hull is mostly done but needs to be faired a bit and painted. I'm waiting on some parts so that I can finish the daggerboard and main foil and I need to sew the tramps. I also need to get the misc. hardware and get everything mounted on the boat. And I need to build a dolly. It's really just a lot of little stuff at this point and I'm still hoping to be sailing in a month, but tomorrow its off to Seattle for the NOODs!

Holy Epoxy Batman

So here is the Bladerider foil that I'm fixing up. I drilled two small holes in the foil where the core was crushed and started dripping in epoxy. And OMG did the epoxy flow. I had to go back to the garage three times to get more epoxy. It took twice as much epoxy as I was expecting to fill in the void. It seems to have done good job though.

Foils, foils, foils

The foils are all here. They all need some work, but at least they are here. Lets start with the rudder horizontal. This is a nice Bladerider foil that got into "an incident with a power boat". The tip of the foil got cracked and the foil is scratched up quite a bit. Originally I was going to just put some extra carbon on and call it good, but now I have a better idea. The damaged area was very compressible and seemed like the core must have been totally crushed. So instead of reinforcing the outside I'm going to drill into the the foil and then inject epoxy in to replace the core. Then with a bit of fairing and some paint it should be good as new.

The rest of the foils will take a bit more work. They should turn out great, but they are less than completed. The foils are in two halves at the moment. The main foil and the rudder foil came out of the same mold, the only difference being that the main foil is constructed with more carbon than the rudder. I'm going to try and fit the rudder foil into the Bladerider socket. All I should need to do is shape the end and fit a bolt into it then attach the two halves.

The main foil will be a bit more involved. The main foil need have a bunch of mechanical bits fit inside of the foil. At this point I'm not even really sure how to make this happen. Better call Gui.

More Progress

So there isn't much new as far as assembly goes, but lots of new on the parts front. New just today, FOILS! Holy crap Batman. I can hardly believe that I actually got foils, and I didn't even need to spend a fortune to get them. Granted they are not totally finished and will take a bit of work get them ready for the boat, but they look really good and should work great. I was talking to fellow moth home-builder Gui and he had a set of unfinished foils that he didn't need. He's a great guy and ended up selling them to me for just the cost of materials. However, he didn't have a rudder horizontal foil so I needed to find one of those. I send out a message on the US Moth groups page and found a slightly damaged bladerider foil that I was able to purchases very inexpensively. I also purchased some kite tubes to use for some the control rods. As soon as it warms up a bit things should start coming together fairly quickly.

Deck Reenforcement

I love Sailing Anarchy. If it wasn't for that site I would never have attempted this project, but SA is a place you can go and get answers for ANY question. This time it was the deck. I didn't want to leave the deck as just 1/8 ply, it just wouldn't have stood up to abuse. So a quick question on SA gave me the answer. The deck now has a layer of carbon and kevlar underneath which should make the deck quite strong while adding minimal weight. By the recommendations of SA, the kevlar runs the length of the boat and the carbon runs the width. Is the boat now bulletproof? probably not, but I'm at least not going to put my knee through it.

I also got the mast bases turned last week. They look good, but I think that material I got (2" dia delrin) was about 1/8" too small in diameter. I don't like the amount of lip I have holding the base of the mast. The last thing I want is to get it base jammed into the mast and end up cracking it. I'll probably get some more material and turn some new ones in the spring, but at the moment this will work.