Robert Prince wrote:

David Tyler wrote:

We have bought a doll, as near as possible to a 1:5 model of Annie, and we will be using her to stand at the galley, sit in the cockpit, etc, to give an idea of the ergonomics.

Don't tell me it's a Barbie ;-)

Cheers

Maren

No, Barbie wasn't tall enough! We've named our doll Floozie

Turnover day!

Yesterday evening, we took the model off the strongback, and set it right way up. By common consent, we declared her to be cute, jaunty, well-shaped, spacious, and every other good thing that a boat ought to be. I'm happy and relieved that the design is turning out so well, and continuing to tick all the boxes.

Now that we can see inside, it's clear that the hull panels forward of station 2 have more of a conical curve than Freeship indicated on the bodyplan, so I'll be adding a convex curve to the lower parts of the bulkheads at stations 0 and 1. It was worth building the model to find that out. There are some unfairnesses that are probably due to working at model scale, and that will be faired out when we build at full size, but generally all is looking very good indeed.

The planking process may be much easier when panels could be coated and have stringers added on the table. That would enable one to put on thick coats of epoxy in one go. Also by using peel ply no sanding is required for adding interior pieces later. I don’t know if that is possible in your build but maybe you can give it some thought.

I built a 9 meter Wharram catamaran in this way. The hull panels were prefinished with epoxy on the inside and stringers installed before bending the full length panels around the bulkheads. It was a reasonably quick way of building the boat but because the ply was only 6mm thick the bending of the prefinished panels was I suspect a lot easier than it would be with thicker ply. I don't know whether it is the best way to build a boat because the panels need to be true to plan to get the correct hull shape, and for a larger boat bending and fixing long hull panels into position is a big operation, so there is a lot of sense in the decision to build Annie's one hull panel at a time, it allows a lot more control over the operation. 

We've now almost completed planking up the model. Not bad, less than two weeks to reach this stage. If only the full size version were as quick to build! 

This process of working in one-fifth scale has taught me a few things, with much less trouble and expense than would have been the case if we'd gone ahead straightaway at full size. Maybe Freeship is not developing the hull panel shapes entirely accurately, or maybe I mis-measured somewhere, but the topsides didn't meet the bow transom. In full size, the gap would have been about 30 - 50mm. It will be much safer to stay with the conventional method of fitting chine logs and stringers, and applying the hull panels a little bit over size, to be trimmed off later. We are abandoning the idea of using stitch, fillet and tape construction. Also, my plan of making a backbone that slots over the bulkheads has been adjusted, as a result of our experience in building the model. It's still there, forming a T girder with the bottom panel, but it will be confined to the area under the cabin sole, and the higher longitudinal panels of furniture will be added later, after turnover. 

David and I - well, largely David - have started work on a 5:1 scale model of the proposed SibLim.  There has been some spirited debate about details of the build and fit-out as we work on it.  The idea of the model is not only to create a three-dimensional version that allows me to get a better idea of what we will be creating, but also to test out some of the construction ideas and assess the logical order of putting the components together.  I've put a few photos in my profile and plan to add to them regularly: daily with luck.

It's all very exciting and I hope some members will find the whole process of interest.