pwillems

Impressive technique. That looks like you'd barely need to sand it at all.

All sorted. Epoxy wasn't rock hard yet so 20 mins with the orbital brought it back to bare wood. Won't make that mistake again. Cheers.

Hi all, Started yesterday on my Spindrift 11N. The first step involved some butt joins. All went well for one of the sheets, but it appears I failed to correctly wet out a section of the glass on one side of the other sheet. This was the first piece I laid down and the process required me to wet out the glass and lay it down before laying the ply on top of it... I can see now that I should have wet the glass out more thoroughly and also put some goop on the ply as well. The good news is that the 3 other joins look great. So, what is to process to fix this? Do I need to sand back the whole thing removing all the glass and start over? Thanks.

I'm just getting setup to start on a SpinDrift 11N and think I am going to splash on a new saw. I already have a monster Triton 235mm circular saw, but don't want to be attempting any freehand curve cuts with that one. Scares the bejeezus out of me, and besides, it's mounted in it's workbench as a table/crosscut saw. I'm hesitating between a quality jigsaw or a small Ryobi 150 mm cordless circular saw. What should I get?

Hi All, Looking for ideas for the cradle to strap my SpinDrift 11N to the deck of its mothership. Does anyone have any recommendations, or better, experience and photos of their own design? Thanks.

I am intending to do a hoop pine / jarah lamination for seats, gunwales, center board and rudder of my SpinDrift 11N. Jarah has a beautiful deep red color so it should look great, but the stuff is only slightly lighter (or softer) than cast iron. Therefore it is going to be a lamination alternating 20mm hoop pine and 10mm jarah.

Thanks Ken. I really appreciate the offer but I also drive a ute and should be OK to transport the ply. I'll pay Aaron a visit soon.

Thanks Ken. I note we are almost neighbors. Do you have some pointers to local suppliers for marine ply, epoxy and glass? I was about to order online, but would prefer to get it locally.

I would expect that if anything, the extra wood should increase swamped buoyancy. Having said this, your comment is duly noted and I am going to have a think about what could be done to sneak in a little extra buoyancy.

Well, while scouring the net for info on the spindrift, I came across a few references to people saying they'd prefer if it had a little more freeboard. I also found somewhere a response from the designer saying basically he saw no problems with increasing the freeboard and to go for if it would better meet the builder's needs. http://messing-about.com/forums/topic/7905-freeboard-on-the-spindrift/ My boat is going to be used for sail training for the kids at first, but then it is going to become our family car as we circumnavigate. I reckon it's often going to be loaded to the gunwales between passengers and groceries, and will often be used in less than ideal sloppy stuff. So long as it doesn't ruin the boat's other characteristics completely, I am happy to accept the small amount of added windage.

Hi All, First post here! About to start construction on my Spindrift 11N. I'm planning to build it mostly as designed apart from some minor mods such as an extra 50mm freeboard and probably the seats slightly modified to work so that the nesting bow fits snugly. I'm also planning on using some heavier duty tape on the exterior seams as well as covering the entire bottom section with cloth to improve abrasion resistance. With the extended freeboard, I am obviously going to need to raise the height of the transom. What I am not sure of is if I should just add the extra 50mm to the transom across the whole width or if I should only raise the sides and leave the middle section at the designed height. I'm mainly worried about raising the outboard by 50mm and how that could possibly introduce cavitation issues? Any recommendations? Thanks, can't wait to get stuck in.