About ten years back I was able to rip and recover the western red cedar planking from the central section of a Volvo 70 mock-up. At the time I had no idea what it would be used for, except that I hoped it would be an offshore boat of some description and likely to be 9 to 10m length overall as this is I believe the sweat spot for affordability, accommodation and minimum off shore capability. My lunch breaks were spent dodging brads as they were shot out at high velocity whizzing past my ear by the circular saw nail cutting blade. Those that could not be dodged and made contact created a warm sticky mess with my ear lobe dripping blood down my neck and resulting in frantic clean ups before heading back to the office.
The Eric midsection half girth is about 2.5m. The recovered strip planks 36mm wide. So 2500/36 = 72 planks per side. Each plank is about 10m long so 72×10 = 720 linear metres per side. A total of about 1.4km of planking required. At AUD $5.30 per metre I hope to save almost $7500 on material costs. BUT there is some work in this.
First I must remove the remnants of the brads, fortunately they are stainless steel so apart from damaging tools and fingers they won’t case much harm if the occasional one is overlooked.
Nail nippers then..
.. an old matador nail extractor passed on to me by Bill our neighbour when moving to retirement accommodation, he was in his mid eighties, many years ago, are the tools of choice.
Then the faces are lightly sanded to avoid losing too much thickness using a bench mounted drum sander.
And finally thicknessed and straightened to 36mm.
And stored ready for scarfing.
In the foreground is the penultimate bulkhead #7 with laminates just finished after grinding the edges.
At about 34kg I can manhandle back to the jig.
Bulkhead #5 the last bulkhead only needs a light sheathing and keel floor laminates. But the Elu sander had had enough, and seized the lower bearing. All fixed, but now can only resin coat tomorrow AM.
THE PINGO PROJECT 