Daggerboard Crash Box: Building a Watertight Safety Compartment Why We’re Building a Crash Box With the floors already out and the boat this far stripped down, adding a crash box behind the daggerboard case made sense. It’s a genuine safety upgrade — secondary flood protection in case the daggerboard case is breached. The concept is
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Daggerboard Load Paths: Why Bulkhead Position Matters More Than Size Two genuinely different problems came up working around Paikea’s daggerboard case this week: how to support a floor over geometry you can’t physically reach to laminate, and why a bulkhead’s position matters more than how much material is in it. The Problem: A Floor With
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The Floor-Building Assembly Line: Templating, Infusing, and Solving a Leaky Laminating Table Producing floor panels for Paikea has turned into a genuine family assembly line — every stage running in parallel, with each person’s job feeding directly into the next. How the Line Actually Works The process repeats section by section, since the geometry around
Halfway Through the Floor Replacement: 300kg Down and Counting Harry’s floor is coming up next — an estimated 30kg once it’s out, though the real number won’t be known until it’s actually on the scale. Getting there means working through 30-something-year-old screws, most badly corroded, and a full sheet of plywood backing that’s coming out
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Cutting a Structural Bulkhead for Headroom: The Beam Theory Behind It Constant head-smacking on a low door frame is a genuine, recurring injury on this boat — the kind of thing that’s easy to live with for years and then finally worth fixing properly, now that the boat’s mid-construction and the freedom to re-engineer things
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Salvaging a Failed Vacuum Infusion: How We Saved a Boat Floor This week’s floor came in two parts — the hatch first, then the floor itself, built around the hatch as its own mould. Between cold weather, a resin that turned out to be genuinely dodgy, and a vacuum that wasn’t quite there, it didn’t
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