When it comes to building or upgrading a cruising boat, the question of materials is never simple. Should everything be carbon fiber? Is fiberglass “good enough”? Recently, we sat down with Shane in the engine room to dive deep into the specifics of our rudder system, tiller arm, and torque tabs. The conversation covered everything […]
Carbon vs. Fiberglass – Building for Performance and Reliability Read More »
Making a Composite Rudder Part One: Shaping the Foam Blank April 2023 This footage starts mid-Atlantic. We’re three days without a port rudder, still four or five days out from land, watching the rudder angle readout and trying to keep it between two and five degrees in normal conditions. The breeze is light so we’ve
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Engineering Paikea’s Rig: Adapting America’s Cup Technology for Cruising April 2023 Taking an IACC mast and making it work on a cruising catamaran isn’t a matter of cutting it to length and stepping it. Every system on the original rig was designed for a grand prix racing programme with a full crew, unlimited budget, and
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Building Carbon Fibre Chainplates: Part Two — How It Actually Stays In Part One showed the build. This one answers the question that came in from almost everyone who watched it: how does that black carbon strap actually stay attached to the boat? It’s a fair question, and the answer is worth understanding properly, because
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Building Carbon Fibre Chainplates: Part One Some jobs start small and grow into something else entirely. This one started with a bolt swap in Brittany. By the time it caught up with us properly, it had turned into a full chainplate rebuild — and Shayne was on the other side of the Atlantic delivering Gunboats
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The Right Way to Bolt Into a Carbon Fibre Boat: Threaded Inserts vs. Helicoils Mounting a Clark pump for the watermaker onto a bulkhead sounds like a small job. Getting the threading right underneath it is where the actual engineering happens. Why bolt-into-composite matters more than it looks like it should The plan here is
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