Paikea Refit Archives | Page 4 of 19

Fitting Composite Hatches: Installation, Alignment, and Converting Portlights to Hatches

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 Using 3D Printed Molds

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

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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Advanced Resin Infusion: Avoiding Close-Outs and Racetracking (Members)

This one’s for members Our members library is where the real work lives: original technical content from the people who did the work, using materials and methods from the highest levels of the sport. Inside our Membership Site: Extended video walkthroughs from Paikea’s refit and our professional jobs New members videos uploaded regularly Downloads and

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October 2025 Update

October 2025 Update Read More »