The Unglamorous Side of a Refit: Fairing, Filling, and Fixing Leaks Most of a refit isn’t the exciting part people picture — it’s fairing compound, sanding, and prep, week after week. Here’s what a week of that actually looks like on Paikea’s port side. Harry’s Room, Reconfigured Harry’s room — the kids’ hull — has […]
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Hull Weight Reduction & Flush Hatch Installation: Paikea Refit Update Watching the waterline creep down, tide line by tide line, over the better part of a year is one of the more satisfying kinds of progress on this refit — slow, cumulative, and now finally starting to show. Why this started as a repair job
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Fitting Composite Hatches: Installation, Alignment, and Converting Portlights to Hatches Building a hatch is one problem. Cutting a hole through a proven, watertight deck to fit it is a genuinely different one. Cutting into a deck that already works The original hatch arrangement had one real advantage worth preserving rather than cutting away entirely: a
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Building Composite Hatches: From 3D-Printed Mould to Finished Part Every hatch on this boat starts the same way — not with fibreglass, but with a mould nobody will ever see once the part comes out of it. Why 3D-printed moulds, and why not always Building tooling for a job like this runs against a genuine
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Engineering Composite Flush Hatches: Why We Started From Scratch Paikea’s original hatches were thirty-two years old, genuinely well-built, and still failing in exactly the way expensive equipment fails when it’s finally reached the end of what it was designed for. What was actually wrong with them These aren’t cheap hatches. They’re proper offshore-spec units with
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Building Lightweight Composite Shelves for a Catamaran Interior On a boat, every millimetre of storage space is worth fighting for, and every kilogram you add to get it is worth thinking twice about. In this stage of Paikea’s interior refit, we tackled both problems at once: building a set of composite shelves into a bunk-end
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