Portland i550

On the i550 North American Class Association website there is space for anyone to start a blog to document their own build progress. The Portland group has decided to move its own construction updates to this site and reserve this site for our own fleet business and announcements. Please check out our latest build update at http://i550na.org/content/lots-and-i-mean-lots-going.

We are a group of 5+ builders in Portland that is building at least 5 boats, and we have formed a local fleet association.  We have set up a forum on this site and would like to communicate and discuss issues and ideas with other local owners. We plan to maintain a section of this forum for regional owners ONLY in an effort to avoid some of the issues that have occurred at the i550.org site. We hope to keep things positive and informative and most of all FUN with our class.

Our immediate goal is to contact and coordinate with other i550 owners and builders in the NW region in an effort to share information and to grow & develop the fleet. We have identified a “region” for the i550 class to include Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Western Montana, and British Columbia (including Vancouver Island). Within this Region there are currently 27 plan sets and 11 active builds. What can we do to help you get started on your build? Is there anything that we can do to help you finish your build? Are there parts that you need assistance finding or building? We would be happy to help any way we can.

Locally, we intend to have 3 boats racing by May of 2011 and expect to have 5 boats completed by the fall. We will race week nights on the Columbia River and hope to spend a few weekends each year traveling the region sailing in fun and exciting venues. As a component of this, we would like to develop a Regional Race Circuit with annual events in locations such as Cascade Locks, Eugene (Fern Ridge), Yale Lake, Cow Bay, Seattle, Vancouver BC, Sandpoint and other areas.

If all of this sounds like a good idea to you, please contact us through the “Contact Us” link you see above, or simply register for an account on this site and post your thoughts on the forums.  We look forward to hearing from you!

We rent shop space from a boat building club in Portland called Rivers West. If you have any interest in building your own boat and live in the Portland area, I highly suggest you check them out.  They’re a great bunch of guys, and you can rent space from them at a reasonable rate and have access to all of their tools and facilities.

So, what do you do when Rivers West has one of its monthly board meetings at the shop, and you just happen to have a boat that needs flipping?  You get them to help you flip the boat, of course!  And that’s just what we did…

Now that our second hull is upside down work continues at a good clip. Since this time around we had a better idea how to create a fair hull shape, there is not nearly as much fairing work that needs to be done as there was on our first hull. Pretty much the only spots that needed fairing were near the keel slot and along the chine. Otherwise, it seems letting the hull panels dictate the shape of the boat rather than coaxing them to conform to the frames seems to be the way to go.

Reinforcing the chines with 8oz fiberglass tape

All dressed up and ready for epoxy

Coated with the first round of epoxy

We’re at the Portland Boat Show this week!  If you can, please stop by and say hello.  The show officially opens tomorrow morning and it runs through Sunday.  We look forward to meeting you there.

The cockpit on the second hull has been bonded into place.  Just like on the first hull, the cockpit was tacked together using the hull itself as a template with a sheet of plastic between the hull and cockpit pieces to prevent them from bonding together accidentally.  The whole piece was then flipped over and permanently bonded into one solid piece.  Plywood backing plates were also added in the appropriate areas.  It was then flipped back over and bonded to the rest of the hull.  Notice as well the cleats added along the top edge of the frames to provide a large area to bond the hull to.

The first hull made it to the rigger’s yesterday.  Things are getting real…

Progress on the second hull is well underway.  A few things have changed this time around.  We have already figured out most of the bugs and decided on how we want all details, so progress is much faster.  Construction on this hull began in earnest on October 12, and the second hull is almost ready for paint on the inside and cockpit construction is well underway.  When you take into account the three weeks that two of the guys in the fleet were sailing in Mexico on the Baja Ha Ha (lucky bastards), the progress so far has been particularly swift. 

Baja Ha Ha – faces not shown to protect the not-so-innocent

If you are going to be in the Portland area January 12th to the 16th, you can stop by and see us at the Portland Boat Show!  We will have one completed hull and one in-progress hull at the show, and there should someone from the fleet there most evenings to answer any questions.  We hope to see you there!

So, getting on to the business of the second hull, I will try to focus primarily on things that have been done differently this time around.  Much is the same (sanding never gets fun), but a number of things we are doing a little differently.  First of all, we constructed a proper cradle to hold the hull.  Previously we simply supported the hull in only 3 areas, and the cradle was about as study as an Irish bank.  Unfortunately, the hull shape probably suffered a bit because of this, but this time around the cradle is built for the ages.  There is a 1/2″ plywood support at each frame position, and they are securely fastened to engineered wood I-beams used in home construction.  The thing is a tank.

Once again, stitch-and-glue construction takes things from random bits of plywood to a boat-like object in a short period of time…

By mid-November the frames were getting installed…

Frame 89 got doubled-up to provide extra support for the mast…

Carbon was added to the bow to further stabilize the sprit hole (there’s gotta be a nautical term for that thing)…

And there’s a piece of hard plastic to support the sprit bearing and make it slide back and forth more easily for articulating.

We’ve also included  holes in the side of the hull to help drain any water that gets in around the sprit hole, but I unfortunately do not have any good pictures.  I’ll try to include some in the next update.

We also had the foresight to pre-cut the access holes to the sealed bunks as well as limber holes for proper drainage.

As of a couple evenings ago, the cockpit was well underway and the inside had been painted with a first coat of sealing epoxy.  With a little luck the inside will be painted next week and the deck and cockpit permanently attached.

The first hull of the Portland i550 fleet is complete!  …mostly.  The minor details of a keel foil and rudder still need to be attended to, but we are building molds for those.  Still, the hull itself is basically ready to go.  In the next few weeks it will be making its way up to the Seattle area to spend some quality time with a rigger, but for now it sits in my garage while work on hull number two gets going.

It’s starting to get cold and rainy here in Portland, but I hope to be able to put up a few pics from out on the water in the near future.  In the meantime, you’ll have to make do with the final build pics.  Enjoy!

Finishing up some final details…

A view of the articulating sprit rigging and setup…

 This companionway cover is simplicity itself…

 

A few close-ups of the new shiny bits.  These were made by a local outfit.  They’re not “marine”, which means they cost about half as much as they would have otherwise!

 

 

If you’re a fan of cooking shows, this is going to feel familiar.  The host cook shows you all the ingredients, starts putting them together, and then turns around and pulls a perfectly done roast out of the oven.  Well, that’s kinda what’s happened here… except that it took 6 months.

The last time I updated this blog we were looking at a bunch of plywood in a boat-like configuration.  Now, it’s pretty much a boat.  It still needs hardware, and there are a still some foil and other fiddly details to figure out, but it’s pretty much there.  In the not too distant future I may even have pictures of it out on the Columbia.

What happened in the past 6 months?  Well, my compatriots put a metric shit ton of work into this thing.  I helped some too, but between having a new baby at home and going through some seriously busy times at work, I’ve been a little (OK, a lot) lazy on the boats and blogging fronts.

So, with all due apologies to the rest of the Portland i550 crew, here are a bunch of pictures of what’s been going on…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s been one month since I’ve updated this blog, but I have an excuse.  My wife and I have been busy with the newest member of the sailing crew…

This is baby Adeline, and she will be helping her father to sail his i550 some day.  Can you see the look of concern in her eyes?

So, while I haven’t been over at the boat shop much lately, my fellow builders have been, and they’ve been busy.  Not only has there been a lot of building going on, but there’s been a lot of “refining” and “re-engineering” as well.  Hopefully it’s all for the better… Here’s what the boat looked like a few weeks ago:

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So far, so good…  You can even get a glimpse here of the plans we have for an articulating bowsprit.  I imagine this is a first for the i550 class.  We shall see how it goes, but if nothing else you can’t claim we’re not being ambitious.  Speaking of ambitious….

We’ve had a cabin-ectomy!  There was some back-and-forth in the group as to whether the cabin should stay or go, but in the end we figured the reason we are building these boats is to race them.  If we wanted boats that offer generous accommodations, we wouldn’t be building these boats.  Note that this is not a flush-deck super-extended cockpit design like Chris Beckwith’s (http://i550paninaro.blogspot.com/).  There will still be a companionway, and it will still be possible for non-claustrophobics to go below.

You can also see above that the cockpit frames have indeed been trimmed back as promised to accommodate the widened cockpit.  We’ve also placed in stringers along the hull sides, and we’ve added “floor-to-ceiling” stringers along the hull bottom.  These are going to be part of a dry well in the center of the cockpit for sticking the outboard while racing as well as providing some flotation (at least when it’s not being used for beer storage as well).

You can also see the cleats that we’ve added along the top edges of the frames.  These were created by ripping some 1×1 stock along the diagonal.  They were glued in using thickened epoxy and held temporarily in place with brads.  These will provide a solid gluing surface for the cockpit sole, cockpit sides, and decking to adhere to and should prevent having to send anyone below to attempt filleting and taping joints in an space about the size of a coffin.

Finally, we also went through a back-and-forth discussion in the past few weeks about whether we wanted to go with a keel- or deck-stepped mast.  Eventually we settled on a deck-step, and here’s the solution we came up with:

The arc you see above is 6 thin pieces of old clear yellow cedar that have been laminated together.  Dave has had them sitting in his garage for a couple of decades, and they have finally found a home in our project.  It seems as stiff as a piece of steel, and it should be a great way of distributing the mast loads evenly.

The keel box has also been installed and plans for foils should start shaping up soon as well.  I’ll update on both of these aspects soon…