Paikea Refit Archives | Page 4 of 20

Engineering Composite Flush Hatches: Why We Started From Scratch

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

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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Fixing a Vacuum Infusion Implosion: The Repair

Fixing a Vacuum Infusion Implosion: The Repair The infusion had been running for a couple of minutes, resin pulling through the laminate exactly as it should, when the pull sped up and the whole box beam gave way at once. A week of templating, foam cutting, and careful fitting, gone in the time it took

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Why Did the Box Beam Implode? Your Questions Answered (Part 2)

Why Did the Box Beam Implode? Your Questions Answered After the last video, the questions came in fast — and they were good ones. Before showing how the repair actually came together, it’s worth working through the reasoning behind some of the choices that led to the implosion in the first place. None of it

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Building a Structural Box Beam for Paikea’s Hull

Building a Structural Box Beam for Paikea’s Hull There’s a section of hull in the aft cabin that used to lean on a bit of luck. Years ago someone built a partial bulkhead in there for an ensuite that no longer exists, and it never actually ran down to the floor. It’s an easy mistake

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Shayne infusing the structural box beam in stbd aft cabin

Finishing the Stanchion Sockets: Load Paths, Peel Ply, and the Vacuum Bagging Process

Finishing the Stanchion Sockets: Load Paths, Peel Ply, and the Vacuum Bagging Process The last of the starboard side stanchion sockets went in during a genuinely hot stretch — air temperature around 32°C, laminating inside the hull with a portable air conditioner running flat out just to make the space workable. Not the most comfortable

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