Apteryx

Nice, extremely nice! I didn't realize how much headroom Belhaven offers.

Fair winds, Charlie and Laura! Get Grime to post your position more often though, unless it bugs you to have kibutzers following you. Hope that wind cooperates. I know how it can be, lord, how I know it can be. Four walls to this cubicle, all of 'em rocky lee shores... :-D

Ditto the request for interior Belhaven pictures. I keep thinking someday a CS17 is going to hop out of my pile of plywood, and when it does, if I build a boat with a cabin I'll have all my sailing needs covered with homemade boats. The Belhaven is on my short list of what I might dive into next year. In fact, Belhaven probably _is_ the short list. That Apostle of Speed article sure got my interest back up!

Dadgummit, I missed all the fun! Is it archived anywhere?

Looks good, and it looks like your staff is rightfully proud of themselves, too!

Good luck to all in the NC challenge!

Announcement? Something big?? Any hints? :-D

Yes, John, I really expected you, or somebody else in the BOOTS crowd to shoot at the back of the boat. Those marshmallow cannons really got out of hand one year, and once a pirate, arr, always a pirate. Peace will not last forever and someday the confectionery will undoubtedly fly again. But note I'll be quadruple planked at the stern. There I'll be, racked twixt a lee shore and a Lake Texoma buccaneer raking my stern. All will seem lost but a midshipman aboard my boat will point to the marshmallows bouncing harmlessly off my transom, rallying my crew with the cry, 'Huzzah! She has a butt of iron!' Yep, I can just see my boat, docked in Charleston 200 years from now and how the crowds will adore the legacy of Old Ironbutt. No? Oh well, the lot of a dreamer, the dreams are fantastic but somewhere along the line life always requires a little sweat.

Any thoughts about where to locate the outboard bracket? I'm ready to reinforce the transom, and I think a 12 inch wide piece with its centerline about midway in the port half of the transom would be about right. Suggestions appreciated. This week I was pretty sure I wouldn't have any blocks of time, so I made a laminated 'plank' out of 3/8 x 3/4 strips ripped from a plain-sawn 1x12. For one thing I wanted to make sure an outboard reinforcing piece wouldn't split under abuse. Also, I was curious about the problems I would encounter making a laminated piece like this - call it a materials experiment. I made a 12 inch by 17 inch plank in four layers - the outer two wth the strips as shown, the inner two layers on opposing diagonals. It's heavier than just wood, weighing about five pounds. It's also very, very stiff feeling. I can't flex it the tiniest bit. It's much more rigid than the 1x12 it came from. I think I'll use it for my outboard mount reinforcement. Or, if the hamster dance seems poised for a comeback I've got a dance floor for them. The little buggers sure won't be able to stamp through it... :-D Any pointers on where to put the outboard bracket?

I've never been on a Core Sound, but I bet the water that gets you is from the lee bow splashing the water up where it's caught by the wind. When I get to the point of designing a pop-up canvas cabin for my CS17 I'm going to see if I can make it a two-stage thing. I'd like to be able to set it up as a dodger, or fully up as a shelter for the night. Perhaps a dodger is the answer?

John, that sure does look like a boat, and what a beauty! With that ruler flat bottom she will plane like a WITCH!! Extending the deckhouse all the way aft was a stroke of genius, although that completely curved deck might get slippery. No, wait, I see the stairsteps you've engineered. Brilliant. :drinking: Seriously, congrats on the progress! Someday I'll catch up. Slow but steady, that's me, maybe a little too much emphasis on the 'slow' part, but what wonders I'm learning. Wood is so cool. Lapstrakes, that looks cool, too. :-D

Yes, indeed - most inspiring. She looks lovely!

Wiping the mashed potatoes off the boat could be messy, but wiping the mashed potatoes off with a slice of homemade cornbread, that wouldn't be so bad. And there's a great boat name there, too - the S/V Gravy Schooner. :-D

Someday she'll be no longer a pile of plywood - that will be 'two best days' rolled into one. I remember being terribly excited to start this CS17 and I'm sure I'll be equally stoked up the day I can get away with saying she's finished. That same day (or close thereon) I'll start a larger boat, with a cabin. And then that's it, the end of my boat building career. Except for a dinghy. I have a dinghy with no class at all, a recycled plastic thing. It's nice, but it's not something I made. So, no more boat building with the exception of a dinghy. Given my wife's horror of heeling (darn it), we might someday want a small power cruiser. Not sure I could handle building anything like an Outer Banks 20, but something (arg!) without a sail would please my wife. But after the dinghy, the power boat, and maybe a larger camp-cruising sailboat... When I first got my CS17 kit there was a pile of disposable small paint mixing trays marked down at the local Wally World. They were about five by five inches and worked well for mixing up to about three pumps of epoxy. Maybe more, but I haven't needed to work with larger quantities. In retrospect I probably shouldn't have used them. Epoxy bonded to the tubs. I never noticed the tubs getting soft from the epoxy but since it was bonding it's possible the epoxy was picking up some of the chemistry of the tubs. I finally ran out of them, and being a creature of habit I went back for more. Wal Mart no longer stocks them, so I got a three dollar pack of 'Gladware' food tubs as an experiment. Hefty contractor garbage bags have zero adhesion to epoxy, so I use them quite a bit, and the food tubs had that same slick plastic feel. Sure enough, cured epoxy comes right out of them with no visible effect to the plastic so the Gladware tubs are reusable. Here's a picture of a tub with some epoxy left in it, mostly squeeze out I scooped up. The bottom photo shows the same tub after the epoxy popped out like a casting out of a mold.

Well, I contacted an unimpeachable resource in the stratified world of high performance cat-ketch design and I now believe it's absolutely imperative that boat's builder chime in with some pictures and some of his insights. Lovely craft, isn't she?

If that's an EC boat, the crew should toast their competitors with crisply chilled mineral water before sailing off in their blue blazers - assuming you could launch according to EC rules that would be quite the luxury liner in the crowd! The masts appear to be three piece units, Core Sound-style. A cliff-hanger we have here...

I can see in the bow a likeness to the Core Sounds - no chine at the stem and perhaps that's a smooth continuous curve without ever becoming straight. Where was the boat spotted? Any other information - looks like an interesting boat. Googling around to try to appear more astute than I am, I can't find anything quite like it. Whatever it is, it doesn't seriously injure the eyes. The lifelines are a bit jarring to my thinking, but I'm sure they are effective at seining the sailors from the sea in a knockdown.

Wow, that looks nice, John. I would say way better than my centerboard, but I've taken to disowning it. Anybody asks what that funny board-like thing in the corner of the garage, I just explain the previous resident here had abysmal boat building skills and in a fit of despondency left his miserable centerboard in the garage when he left. I'll throw it out, I explain, as soon as I get a moment. Router jigs, that's the answer, I'm convinced of it. Hmmm... Found more smileys, here's a nice one for those of us often making targets out of our own feet... :microwave:

I can hear hull #226 wailing and gnashing her teeth. A three month build, that's awesome. Hmmm... three months from today... Sailing over the Thanksgiving break... Sigh... Congrats!

Thanks for that tip! My first attempt at a centerboard turned out quite horrid. Good practice, I guess, but somewhere a fir tree weeps for the sad fate of her children, hacked to pieces and entombed in a centerboard not fit for firewood. Oh, well, thank goodness for the privileges of being warm blooded.

They popped in over on trailersailor.com. Sounds like they are in Mandeville, Louisiana. What an adventure!

I decided to do (I think this is the right term) housed dovetails in my deck beams to carry the fore-and-aft members. Here's my start - the aft deck structure, just sitting together. I won't use any glue until it goes in the boat. In that picture the fore-and-aft beams look to be angled but that's just the camera lens and the way the assembly was sitting - the beam faces are all plumb. The fore-and-aft pieces are planed to a contant trapezoid cross section - the beams sit vertically and the upper surface matches the curve at the point they fit in the deck beams. When I cut them to length to go in the boat, they shouldn't require much in the way of sanding or planing. For the forward bulkhead I think I'll glue a transverse beam across both sides of the upper edge. That way I can do my dovetails for the beams going each way, forward and aft, from the forward bulkhead. Fun stuff! My beams match the contour of the bulkheads to a high degree, and I'm happy with the fit of my afterdeck beams.

My oldest son bought the plans for both the Vacationer and the Weekender. In the notes it's said the centerboard was dropped from the design because they found it sailed as well without it. Travis let me take the helm of Pilgrim once, a delightful experience, and I was able to steer her around by balancing the main and mizzen trim quite easily. She didn't respond quickly, particularly in the light air we had, but what a boat!

Drat. I was hoping to steal your foil ideas. I've built a centerboard for my CS17 but I'm going to build another. No tears shed over the first centerboard, I learned about epoxy and planing, and a few things like that. Version two will be a little less like Charlie Brown's Christmas tree. I hope. ;D Last night I bought a jointer. I know, gonna be hard to explain the hole in the credit card when my wife gets back in town, but I think it will be helpful in certain tasks. Actually, I went to buy a bench sander, but if I bought just a little more I could get six months' no-interest. Yeah, that's my story, I wouldn't have bought the jointer except it saved so much on interest. Anyway, making a precisely dimensioned stick of wood has possibilities, and my luck with shaping my first centerboard was minimal. But, maybe I could shape the planks as a series of trapezoids and after gluing have a stepped shape I could just fair down with a sander. I bet that sounds like way too much trouble, but maybe even with my minimal artisanship I could end up with a good, symmetrical centerboard.

Well, Travis, I can't answer for John, but for my part I've got a valid excuse. My wife is out of town at a teacher's seminar in Galveston. No adult supervision here. ;D It's tough, too. The original plan was for us both to go. I was going to try my darndest, somehow, to amuse myself during the days in Galveston town to be there to trip the lights fantastic with her at night. Such visions I had of showing up at the tall ship Elissa with a can of varnish...