BoatBlog

Sunday, January 06, 2013

Sailing day!

Finally sailing. The wind was light and variable, so nothing too challenging, but I did get one or two very nice runs out of her, and learned a thing or two about sailing.

This ought to be the last post in this blog, because I should be out on the water, sailing, and not on the internet..

Friday, January 04, 2013

Rigging test

Today we had the dinghy out on the lawn, for a combined photograph opportunity and rigging test. We made sure that all the ropes were ready and that we knew how to put everything together, and that we had all the pieces we needed. For a moment or two the slight breeze filled the sail, and it was beautiful.

Cleaning the spars.

Today I scrubbed the spars. They got full of finger marks and I wrote some indications on them and they suffered from accumulated dirt, so I got some scouring powder and a bucket of water, and scrubbed the length of them. I think the pictures show that it has been worthwhile: two have been cleaned, one not, and the difference is clear.

Wednesday, January 02, 2013

Prettiest dinghy in the whole world

Today she's the prettiest dinghy in all the world.

Tuesday, January 01, 2013

Inspection covers.

After some long thinking and wondering I came upon a solution to the problem of how to make the inspection port covers secure yet removable. My attempt to have them held with a screw system ran into problems when it then proved almost impossible to remove. Having observed that they're quite difficult to remove when they're just pushed firmly home, I decided to have friction keep them in, and then have a simple tool to pull them out. This lead to a saddle for each plug, which can be pulled with a simple L-shaped hook. I believe they'll be secure enough during sailing, and easy enough to remove for storage.

Monday, December 31, 2012

Done!

My Argie 10 is ready to sail! In this picture the rigging is not yet finished, but before I left for home this evening she was ready to sail. Granted, it would be only sailing upwind, because the mainsheet is a little short, but it would sail.

Hopefully I'll be able to post a nicer picture tomorrow.

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Tensioning the luff rope.

The luff track is fitted to the top half of the mast, and I'm tensioning the luff rope to estimate the length of track I'll need on the bottom of the mast.

It's starting to look like a mast with a sail!

Fitting the luff track.

A Cleco clamp holding the luff track in place. It's a miracle tool for jobs like this!

Mast head

I've now created a mast head sail attachment. It's a fairly elegant design, but the main thing is that it is done now.

Now I can start fitting the track for the sail's roped luff.

Saturday, May 05, 2012

Track mount

This is how I'm going to fit the rope track to the mast: with some blind rivets. This design will cause some small asymmetry in the sail, but I'm sure it won't matter much. It won't look very pretty (in fact the phrase 'ugly as home-made sin' springs to mind) but it will do the job.

Track fitting

Here I've fitted a short section of the track on the sail's luff. It slides on smoothly and easily.

Slide

At last the rope rail for the dinghy's sail arrived! Two three-metre lenghts.