The Beginning of a New Adventure

66 years old.  So now what?  I am not yet ready to join the pipe and slippers brigade and spend my days watching TV.
So I have decided (from the inspiration of Nathan Levin) to build another boat, a sailing yacht, and sail across the Atlantic in a singlehanded race. I havn't been sailing for about 25 years so it is time to see if I still can.  My budget is limited so I have settled on a 5m Setka A, designed by Janusz Maderski. 

I ordered the plans from Janusz and spent many a long hour perusing, planning, researching, and finally ordering materials.  I live on a small island in the middle of the Atlantic where things like good quality marine ply, epoxy, etc, are not available.  Thank goodness for Mr Google (one thing we have here is fast internet - 200 Mbps).

Oak for keel bearers, A4 nuts and bolts, 316 stainless steel for fittings - forget it.  All got to be found online and ordered.  Fortunately just returned from the Netherlands after selling our canal cruiser and sent a big box to the Azores full of goodies.

Been away from home for over 2 months but now starting to get back into building "Nuts"

The Start

While waiting for ordered plywood and epoxy to arrive (ply from Spain and epoxy from Portugal) I decided to start on the keel

The Very Beginning

Big lump of wood on my tiny lathe made my teeth rattle till it was round.

Getting closer to the required shape

Planing it down in half

In half, ends finished by hand, and covered in wax

Made box to make concrete mould

 Some steel reinforcing to fit in mould box

Ready for pouring concrete

All poured and now just have to wait

Box demolished and plug pulled out. Just waiting to dry out and fill with lead

The Keel

While concrete curing  - bought some steel (actually enough for two keels but minimum they would sell)

Very wasteful to cut the design out so cut it without the little stubs at the top

I cut small pieces from offcuts and bevelled them 50% each side to weld on

Welded the stubs on and ground them flat 

Chopped up an old gas bottle and played with my welding machine and grinder to make a container to melt lead in.

Ready for pouring lead. Made small fire around gas bottle filled with lead which was shielded by cement blocks (but open on the bottom for air with the help of a little fan which got a bit melted).  The lead melted quicker than expected and the system worked very well.

First pour with the help of Nathan who is also building a Setka (and got me started on this adventure)

Happy as a pig in Sh1t at the result.  We poured the second half and Nathan whizzed home to get his lead and we poured his 2 halves while the fire and mould were hot.

Setka kit arrives!!

Plywood arrived in good shape all the way from Spain via truck to Lisbon and ship to Azores.  Now just got to convert this block of wood into a boat.  As you can see my workshop is in  bit of disarray with many other projects on the go.

Fiddling with frames

The very beginning: actually starting with some bits of wood

Transom frame

Frames moving along

Getting bigger.  Still tiny but a small boat after all

 These frames were made in early spring so weather still too cold for epoxy. I took the frames into our house, where we have a wood burning stove, and placed them on the roof beams above the stove.

You can see the chimney pipe.  Fire going and nice and warm for curing epoxy.  One advantage of building a wooden boat is lots of offcuts that can be converted into heat in winter.

I had a pile of pine wood (from many years ago) which I machined into the correct dimensions and made a jig for the scarf joints on the stringers.

Also made laminated deck beams.  

Glued up all the stringers and finished the frames and flew off to France to move our small canal cruiser from Roanne in France to Roermond in the Netherlands to put it up for sale in order to pay for this project.

Back home

Got back to Faial Azores towards end of May after a very interesting cruise  in complicated conditions on the French canals.  Low water and weed were the problems.

A new beginning, or second start

I see in the Setka Atlantic Challenge conditions you must have a blog of construction with at least the frames up on the strongback.

So here goes.

Frames going up.

Some progress with frames set up and stringers going on

A few more bits of wood

Attacking the stringers with planes to fair up

Crappy photo of transom prep.  I am not a great fan of sanding and epoxy saturation in compact positions so am doing a pre saturation with epoxy and peelply for the inside of all plywood.  It is great fun as I have never worked with peelply before.  Actually very easy.

Pulling the peelply off

Another pic of my first ever  fiddle with peelply

Transom ply glued on

Pre fitting plywood and checking for fairness

Bow section puts a lot of stress into the ply even though it does take the curves.  I think I will laminate the bow section out of 2 5mm thick pieces of ply as I dont want to build in stress areas.

Removed all the ply and saturating the inside with epoxy and peel ply

Stbd side glued on

Port side is ready to glue but very humid today so not messing with epoxy.

Well that is the progress so far - 18th June.