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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Edge Capping a Cored Panel: Packing Unidirectional Fibre Into a Tight Channel Following on from the beam-theory reasoning behind cutting a bulkhead for headroom, this is the actual execution — getting calculated unidirectional fibre packed properly into a narrow routed channel, which turned out to be a genuinely different challenge from laminating it onto a
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Can You Make a Catamaran Too Light? The Real Answer A question that comes up often enough with all the weight coming out of Paikea right now deserves a proper answer, because the honest one has more nuance than a simple yes or no. Can a Component Be Too Light? Yes. Individual parts of a
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