Removing the Vacuum Bag: What Good Consolidation Actually Looks Like The bag came off well. The breather felt was saturated with bleed-off — more than ideal, which means slightly more resin went in than necessary, but it also means the laminate was fully wet out before the vacuum did its job. The frog’s tongue had […]
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Rudder Winglets, Saildrive Fairings, and Getting Paikea Back in the Water Shayne had a bad knee. The splash date was fixed. This is what a refit looks like when you have a deadline, a crew of three boys, and one parent on light duties. The kids stepped up. Ayden and Harry got the engine lifted
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Vacuum Bagging Complex Geometry: Joining a Carbon Beam to a Hull Vacuum bagging a flat panel is straightforward. Bagging a structural carbon tape that has to bond a beam to a hull — transitioning from vertical to horizontal, over compound curves, into tight internal corners — is where it gets interesting. The prep comes first,
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Recutting a Spinnaker Staysail into a Code 0 Tucked in the back corner of a sail container at the yard, there was a spinnaker staysail nobody wanted anymore — built by North Sails for the Swedish Victory Challenge’s 2007 America’s Cup campaign. Over fifteen years old, worn in places, and exactly what we needed. What
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Installing the Carbon Fibre Martingale The first thing you see in this video is the finished martingale in place. Then it cuts to Shayne drilling straight through the carbon front beam we’d built from America’s Cup mast sections. If you know what that beam is made of and what it cost in time and material
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Building a Carbon Fibre Seagull Striker and Martingale By this point in the front end build the beam and longeron were in, the centreboard and rudders were painted, the saildrives were out being serviced. The next job was the seagull striker and martingale — the compression strut and the tension strap that together stop the
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