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Mike Vacanti

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Posts posted by Mike Vacanti

  1. Here is a commercially made auto-inflating mast head float, Secumar. I've never used one of these or even seen one. I imagine it would be raised to the mast head using a continuous line halyard. It's also fairly expensive and it would have to be ordered from Germany. But it would have less windage than a solid float.

  2. 27 minutes ago, Nick C said:

     

     It started life as a flying scot but has been changed greatly. O.H. Rodgers design.

    Thanks, Foghorn. The photo Reacher posted looks nothing like a Flying Scot, even the Frankenscot which appeared in 2014, so I was curious and did a little internet searching. Twobeers and O.H. Rodgers designed and built a 22-foot sloop known as the Spawn of Frankenscot. So it is a new hull hence the major new look. From a blog post by Amy Smith Linton: "A 22-foot long sloop, with a sliding rowing seat and a centerboard, Spawn's chockablock with upcycled parts: a used Melges-20 carbon-fiber mast, twin rudders from a Hobie 16, a narwhale-like bowsprit fabricated from a Captiva mast, Frankenscot's old shaped centerboard, a massive carbon-fiber boom constructed from an A-cat mast that met with an unfortunate accident, big wide hiking racks made of aluminum tubing, borrowed oars." And water ballast, high tech sails, etc.

     

    Sheesh, I thought some of us did boat tinkering. And they are competing in Class 4, right?

     

     

     

    Spawn is a class 4 boat that finished 6 hours behind Randy Smyth's Nacra catamaran. It is a seriously fast boat and the guys who sail it really know what they are doing. 

  3. What type of plywood to use for small boat construction is a source of never ending debate in internet discussions. Personally, I wouldn't build a boat with anything other than name brand marine plywood. Joubert and Brynzeel are 2 very good manufacturers. I know that some low quality far eastern manufacturers stamp their plywood with 1088 but it's really meaningless. The reputation of the manufacturer is the important thing.

  4. There is really only 3 things that could cause the epoxy to not harden.

     

    1. The temperature is too low.

    2. The resin-hardener ratio was incorrect. How did you measure the resin and hardener? 

    3. The epoxy is defective. This seems the least likely culprit. 

  5. 3 hours ago, NowWeTryItMyWay said:

    Thanks to all for the suggestions.  I'm going to construct a new rudder blade and glass it, just to be sure.

     

    @Alan Stewart, as you suggested, since the current rudder blade fits snugly in the rudder assembly, I think just glassing the blank as-is would make it too thick.  I wonder if the right thing to do would be to sand the rudder blade down (or possibly, run it through the thickness planer?) before applying the fiberglass.  Do you happen to know, offhand, how much thickness a layer of fiberglass cloth + epoxy would add?  I would guess somewhere between 1/16 and 1/8".

     

    My thinking is that, if I want the rudder blade to be 3/4" thick, and each layer of fiberglass is X", I would plane or sand the blade down to 3/4-(2 * X) before glassing it.

     

    A single layer of glass is no where near 1/16", here is a handy table from the WEST Systems epoxy folks, laminate thickness

  6. When I wrote a reply to your thread right above the box where I typed my response there are several editing buttons. One of them controls strike-through. Simply select the text that you inadvertently enabled strike-through and then click the strike-through button.

     

    Edited: I tried to go back and edit my post and I notice that the strike-through button is not available when editing an exisiting post.

  7. 53 minutes ago, Paul356 said:

    I haven't rigged topping lifts, although I saw Chick's setup at the messabout and it is pretty slick for masts in tabernacles.  But my masts are freestanding.  That is, I pick 'em up and drop 'em in the hole.  This is on a regular 17, not a 20 or a mark 3.  A topping lift would be one more piece of string to untangle.  So, I let the sprit ends fall into the cockpit when the sails come down, and it's not a big issue.   I have used the halyards a couple of times to hold the sprit ends up and make room in the cockpit, as in the photo.  One issue there was sprits swinging kind of wildly in a chop.  How do the topping lift guys control that swinging?

     

     

    topping lift.jpg

     

    Man, that is a really good looking boat...

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