Aft cabin and cockpit construction.

With respect to the vacuum infusion of the deck there is a natural separation between the deck and roof of cabin and aft cabin, as a result of the aft beam construction. So it is not necessary to infuse the whole deck at once and therefore I have decided to first infuse the aft cabin roof so I can finish the construction of the aft cabin and cockpit.

To get some more room in the cockpit I made the seats 175cm long (my body length) instead of the 168cm in the plans. (for nice romantic sleeping under the stars, etc, etc.) After the mounting of the aft cabin hatch it turned out that I’ve been a little too enthusiastic with the lengthening of the cockpit seats. To make the hatch fit I had to make a cut out in the bridge and that just didn’t look very well. The other option, positioning the hatch more aft, is not desirable because of the position of the main sheet track. Repositioning the latter results in less pushing force in the boom to help mast rotation so the mainsheet track dominates the position of the rear of the hatch. To resolve this I’ve added two extra foam panels to the front panels of the aft cabin which resulted in a correction of 32mm, which is just perfect.

Oh well, it seems you shrink as you get older.

Aft cabin hatch.

I am awfully behind in updating this blog. However, progress in the past months was hardly visible, just being busy with lots of smaller but time consuming parts. More updates will follow soon so stay tuned.

In this photo gallery (click in the picture) the making of the aft cabin hatch base. The preperations for all Lewmar flush hatches are now finished.

Update timelapse video workshop webcam

And I did some more vacuum infusion, like the aft cabin deck and the V-berth bottom for in the bow.

Site statistics 2012

This Blog had about 18249 visitors in 2012 and that is almost 6% less than 2011. However, Fram’s Website continues to be popular and even with an increase of 20% compared to last year. This is satisfactory.

But what about the physical efforts?

2012 – 2003 = 9. This way, and secretly, I always fooled myself one year by making the calculation this way. Of course this is not true and I now have to confess that since last month ten years (10!) have been passed since I started working on this project. Wow, this is not what I had expected which, at the same, time is also not a surprise. After all, without a positive attitude such a huge DIY project is lost in advance. So I’m happy to say that my motivation is still there, but with the inevitable ups and downs.

This has been translated to the average number of hours per week that I’ve spent on the project.

Initially I thought that I was able to spent about 20 hours per week but considering my work and social live for me this has been proved infeasible.

On the basis of the experience data of Ian Farrier, I have my goal set on 7500 to 8000 construction hours and despite the disappointing progress, it seems that I’m still reasonable on this schedule.

Incidentally, this justifies a compliment to the address of Ian Farrier. He is one of the few, if not the only designer who gives realistic construction hours for the build of his ​​designs.

More figures are on my website.

CNC milled rudder plug.

During the construction of my boat, I have gotten a lot of relationships with other boat builders, both domestically and abroad. The exchange of experiences has proved extremely valuable and is also one of the many fun incidentals of such a DIY project. Here in the Netherlands are two fellow boat builders who are both involved with CNC technology. Bert (F39) as a professional and Nico (F82SR) as a hobbyist. The fabricated parts and the mold for the daggerboard are being made by Bert​​. And just recently Nico offered to make the two rudder plug halves for my F39. Nico is an airline pilot and spent his lonely days somewhere far away in a hotel room on the programming of hundreds of lines in the CNC software for my F39 rudder. Great job Nico and thanks again.

So, as an intermediate little project, I am now working on the two by Nico’s CNC router milled rudder plugs in order to make a solid reusable rudder mold of it.

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

With temperatures above 10ºC it is still not much of a winter here. I don’t care but I prefer the liquid water instead of frozen.

A seemingly endless series of chores

The recent months were marked by a particularly stiff continuing of not the most pleasant chores. One of them the hand-lay-up laminating the molded recesses for the deck hatches and the window rebates and then applying a vacuum bag, which is not my favourite job. This work against the resin clock requires a perfect preparation, work fast, focus on infinity, lots of disposable gloves, some sweat and a slow hardener. But it is almost done now. Only the escape hatch in the foredeck still to do, but somehow I cannot get the right specs and the delivery of the ordered hatch has been delayed.

All these small chores have to been done but are a bit tiresome. However the end is in sight and I look forward to a more visible progress.