i550 Sport Boat

Pictured, at left is Andrew Clauson's "Tokyo Trash Baby," hull number one lying in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. This is what we'll be shooting for with the Baltimore build.

About 15 years ago I bought this book written by Reuel B. Parker on sharpies (The Sharpie Book). I always loved the designs for their simplicity of construction, understated elegance and shallow draft! I figured one day I might give it a go and build a small one, just for grins. Cut to 2007....I'm boatless and thinking about that the next vessel might be.

Criteria:

small. trailerable. 3 crew max. Potential for OD. A-sail. Sprit. CHEAP.

Then I saw this on Sailing Anarchy and this on YouTube and this on the designer's site.

Other builder's blog's:

• Peregrine • Pipedream •Alchemy •Tons of Pix of the Minnesota i550

************************************************ THE BUILD ********************************************

12/14/08...HOOP ROOFED & STITCHED UP

Got a cover on the Hoop House and then that night it snowed and the next day we had like 40 mph winds, and the thing stayed up, so I guess the next step is to get some ends on the structure and then put in the stove. The boat is now stitched together and I can't do much more on it, outdoors, until it either warms up into the 60's or the stove goes in.

So over the holiday I'll get the thing heated and then get going with 6 oz biax and some pox. In the meantime, there's a bunch of stuff to get done indoors, stitch together the cabin trunk up, carve the keel bulb plug, build some lightweight I-beams out of pox and ply to use as stringers and cockpit sole supports, etc.

Always something to do...

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11/29/08.....A HOOP HAUS

These earlier than normal persistant cold temps are putting a serious damper on my build progress, so I decided to throw up a quick hoop house....$71.00 bucks worth of rebar and 3/4 inch gray conduit.

The cover is a flame retardant tarp that I bought online and hasn't shown up yet in a UPS truck. The the ends get capped with a 2x3 and beadboard wall (to keep it looking nice), a door and a window or two and then the woodstove that is sitting unused in the shed.

Not an enormous amount of space, but 95% of the work I'll do this winter will be inside the hull, so this should be more than adequate and space enough to heat adequately.

It basically took me longer to go to Home Deputz, buy the materials and get it home and unloaded than it did to put up this frame. It's just stitched together with zip ties so that the thing can be adjusted later to get all the frames in line and evenly spaced.

ridge pole unattached here, but almost done.

Next step was get rid of 1.6 billion red maple and willow leaves...

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10/20/08...A hull emerges!

When H.H. "Dynamite" Payson and Phil Bolger tagged these tack & tape designs "Instant Boats" back in the 80's, I was a bit skeptical. Yeah, right..."instant."

But this thing went from a pile of plywood into something actually resembling a boat in an incredibly short time. In fact, I had done the butt joints (plywood being limited to 8' sections, for the most part, the sides [hull panels] and bottom have to be joined in 3 sections to make up the 18' LOA dimensions of the boat..they are joined, end-to-end, in simple, inelegant "butt joints") a weekend or two before....and Sunday morning, after running a 5K event with one of the kids, I came home, turned on the Ravens pre-game show and by half-time I had a hull, maybe 2.5 hours later, MAX!

Single-handed, no less! (as an added bonus, the Ravens actually won a game on the road!)

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10/13/08...back at work, finally.

With the sailing season pretty much done (except for Harbor Cup in 12 days) I can get back to plodding along on the build.

I have one more butt joint to do and then I can stitch this puppy together and will finally have a hull...albeit an empty shell of a hull, but definitely a hull!

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6/25/08....KIt came

Amazing, given a certain amount of motivation, desperation and stupidity, how much crap you can force into a small stationwagon. I got the bulk of this stuff home in one trip, although, as luck would have it, it was blowing like stink when I got the stuff tied down on the roof racks. A block away from where the pallet was unloaded (huge thanks to my man Roger who's company has a forklift) it was becoming perfectly clear that a trip around the Beltway to my house was going to be out of the question (especially at rush-hour). I figured a puff into the mid-20's at 60 mph would put enough apparent wind into my roof foil to rip the whole roof rack assembly off...so I slow-balled it through the citt-tay and arrived with many, many pieces in one piece, so to speak.

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6/15/08......Keel foil faired out

Father's Day allowed me a few hours with power-sanders to get this thing into something resembling a proper foil. Not completely done with the shaping (before it gets glassed) but getting closer.

TR says the kit will be trucked out this Thursday...YAY!

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5/18/08 ...Keel foil coming along

When the end of your driveway is, for all intents and purposes, your workshop, then you are at the mercy of Climate Change to dictate your schedule.

And since climate change, as we know it, is persistent Global Cooling and the tendancy toward turning Baltimore into an Olympic Peninsula-like rain forrest, then don't count on getting much work done outside, except for trying to keep an explosion of biomass in check, e.g, getting out the lawnmower every three-four days...that one day of the week when the sun appears for a few seconds.

I also had 15 races over a 9 day period that took up most of the first 2 weekends in May, so I am definitely behind schedule, but...what schedule? I finally got a chance to break bad on the oak laminate keel foil I'd laid up in April and I attacked that hawg with a 40 grit rotary sander (on a 3/4 inch electric drill) in an attempt to rough out a NACA0012 foil section....here it is so far:

(right) The bottom edge is a bit rough due to some knock-outs that just happen to fall at the cut-off point of the oak sections...no big deal, as the foil is a few inches too long right now anyhow.

Another issue is one section I cut too thin (ignore the outline of the inner foil--that's a 12 inch section that I drew on for some reason...probably wasn't paying attention). This edge will have to be filled in with some 410 Light mixture and then I can fair it out...no biggie.

I figure: get the oak strut as fair as possible but dont lose sleep over it...it'll need to be faired again, once the S-glass goes on, so just make it pretty and deal with the fine tuning after the skin gets laid up.

5/5/08.....13 sections finally laminted for the keel strut

Finally got this bastid glued together and when (if) the weather gets better, I'll sand it down to a true foil section, maybe, one day.

4/27/08...slow going, but progress

March and April are just pure bloody hell for me in terms of work and other obligations, so I didn't expect to make a huge amount of progress over the past two months. One good thing though: my foil core for the rudder arrived from Flyingfoam.com.

It is cut with absolute perfection and gets delivered in the blank from which it was cut...which is a double bonus for both laying up the CF skin and as a form for building the rudder cassette.

I also made a bit more progress on the white oak foil laminte for the keel....hope to wrap up the laminate tonight.

so...things are plodding along.

4/06/08...getting started on the Baltimore Build

Thirteen sections of 1.125 inch white oak ripped to sections derived from a NACA 0012 template.

These will get laminated together to build the keel strut. More pix to follow.

Rudder will be built from a smaller NACA0012 foam section, that has been ordered and should ship soon from flyingfoam.com, an on-line supplier that cuts foam sections by CNC. The foil section for the rudder will be cored in spyderfoam and skinned on carbon fiber.

The plywood for the hull and deck has been ordered as a pre-cut "kit" and should arrive in April.

Note to self: 3 bar clamps on a 60" section are not enough...

(all for now...more later)