aguri katakas

pushing fillets

| agur

Today I filleted and glassed the stern, which means I have finished filleting bulkheads and keel. It took me about a week and lots of boat-yoga to finish this section of work.

I must admit that I did not overwhelmingly enjoyed this head down to the knees epoxy cooking… but nevertheless it is great pleasure to see how step by step those wobbling plywood panels shape up into a sturdy and beautiful boat… all done by my own two little pale hands 😉

And my condolences to this poor quay whose path may cross with this hefty stem fillet…

stemFillet

 

And again I can not get enough of those dare lines of Tiki’s – now all filleted and reinforced…

lines

reinforcing the keel

| agur

TIKI ITATAE – reinforcing the keel from AGUR VISUALS on Vimeo.

Today I continued with fillets. This time were the keel fillets in to-do list, those will be glassed as well.

I use West System 407 Low Density filler. For applying correct radius I produced plywood spatulas. But they are inflexible, so I guess I shall replace them with metal spreaders shaped in desired form…

Check out previous time lapse videos about stuffing the giant taco — starboard hull goes from 2D to 3D and filleting bulkhead radiuses.

 

stitch’n’glue thoughts

| agur

unstitched

Now as I have removed stitches of the diagonal stiffeners, I would like to share some notes on that. Cause God or Devil is in the details…

This was first time for me to perform such kind of gluing method and again I had to learn it by hard way how to make things easier.

So what I would like to point out first is that if you would like to glue all the stiffeners with single evening its better to have helper. One is stirring and spreading the glue and the other is stitching. Yes, one could install the wires to the hull prior glue spreading – but its pretty nuisance to spread the glue between those prickling wires, which will tear up one’s nitrine cloves pretty soon… Actually, when deploying the stiffeners it does no harm to wear leather cloves on top nitrine ones against the prickling ends of the wire.

What I also learned is, that when tightening the wire, its worth to pull it slightly away from the stiffener in same time – in this manner there seem more force transferring into tightening rather than braking the wire.

What you may also like to take special care of is drilling the holes – its better to have them right on the edge of stiffener, when they are inside from the line, its hard to remove the wire after the glue has cured. When the holes are too far away from the stiffeners edge then there could be a bit trouble in tightening.

Wharram suggest to drill small holes for stiffeners stitches (previously stitching the hull there was suggestion to have holes approx. twice the size of the wire) – and I can see that then you have much less epoxy surrounding the wire in the hole which makes wriggling the wire out much easier.

Wriggling – get a notch on that. It concerns the removal of the wires. I seldom used pliers to pull out the wires.

As with most of the other thousand things in life, its rarely the laboured force that helps to achieve your goals.

So take your time, snap the wire outside, bend it back straight, unwind other side and then start to slightly wriggle and turn the wire and when you feel grip of the epoxy starting to loosen then its time to pull wire smoothly out. And yes of-course, during the gluing process its smart to remove as much of excess epoxy as possible, no doubt on that.

 

longing for Doris

| agur

Universe rarely allows you to enjoy multiple pleasures simultaneously, thus the same with my cats. I had to exchange my ‘Dostojevskilik Doris’ to money in order to finance my Tiki 21 building.

So as summer finally sneaked in, I felt little sting in my heart… she rides so smooth, peek by yourself:

Topcat ‘Dostojevskilik Doris’ skimming over Haapsalu bay from AGUR VISUALS on Vimeo.

Doris is Topcat K3 and I could say without much of exaggeration that She has been finest daggerboardless beach cat I have ever owned or sailed. The simplicity of assembly, the ingenious kick-up rudder system which allows you to rise rudders vertically without subsequent weather helm. Which does not only make blasting over shallow water more safe, but is especially handy for solo sailing in strong and gusty wind. One can rose the leeward rudder blade in some amount (sometimes I rose a little bit of windward rudder as well). This calms the boat down little bit, so it does not heel so suddenly. And there will be not much of significant leeway as the boat goes fast in strong winds and therefore giving you enough inertia to play with when you are beating against the wind.

Ah yes, I have to mention those narrow profile hulls, that perform really well in beating against the wind on choppy seas. Based on my experience I could say that Topcat points much higher than other daggerboardless catamarans. Whether they would be Hobie 14, Hobie 16, Hobie 15, Hobie Wave, Nacra 570 or Dart 16 — beachcats that I have sailed.