Boat building progress

Molds being joined

Are you part of the 1%?  The rare minority that can visualize a house when it is only 2×4 timber.  Among the tools, materials, and trash, can you visualize the roaring fireplace in the winter time?   I am in the 99% that just look at the mess and make wildly wrong assumptions.   The living room is too small or the ceilings look too high.    My lack of visualization skills for half-built suburban homes extends to an inability to visualize half-built boats.

Here is my version of how they built an Antares-do not try this at home without adult supervision. It starts with the molds that are used on every boat.  The molds are based on the same technology as is used in the cupcake industry.  Pour in cupcake dough, bake, and out pops a cupcake.   The problem is that a catamaran is too complex a shape to use just one mold so it is more like a tiered layer cake.   Use a variety of molds to create a complex shape and bond it together with icing.   I sure hope they use something stronger than icing to bond together Hull #44.

The workers clean the molds and wax them so that the Boat (cupcake) pops out easily after baking.   The boat’s “paint job”  is installed first by applying gelcoat to the mold.   Then layers of fiberglass and foam core are installed via a complex process called vacuum bagging.   It is okay if you are confused since I have no idea what I am talking about.  I do know that if I see more  2 x4 ‘s, the splash date for my cupcake is coming soon.  Did I mix too many metaphors?

The splash date for the boat is a year away but there is plenty of variance in this estimate.   The first photo shows the hulls before the two mold pieces have been connected.  Go get the cake icing.  The sand color material is the foam core to the boat.   It is  better than the the commonly used alternative, balsa.  Balsa is inferior as a core since it can absorb water and is more complex to repair.

In one of the photos there is a more complete boat in the foreground which is owned by a gentleman from Malaysia.  He is looking for crew from Argentina to Malaysia.  Not a short trip but if you are interested and a real sailor suppose you should drop him a line. — Jason