Its time to start blogging.

As some of you know, I have been living in a small cottage in Rhode Island with Matt and Stefan. We moved in January 1st and started work on the 3rd. You could describe the cottage as small, but that would be a bit of an understatement. It has only two bedrooms, guess who is sharing... But we have an oven, fridge, dishwasher and a microwave, and its all ours. Oh and it was available furnished, and the landlord was willing to lease it on short notice to three college students. Perfect.

We work for New England Boatworks, a wonderful full service marina and boatyard just north of Newport. They have a history of building fast sailing boats. Bella Mente, Il Mostro, Mar Mostro, etc. They also have a sucessful aluminium RHIB shop and produce many of the chase boats for the sailboats they build.  We are working on the new boat for the Bella Mente Racing team. She is going to be a pretty beautiful boat.

It was my goal to go to a small composite yard in the hope that I would get to do more hands on work than I would in a large steel yard. So far, entirely true. An hour into my first day, I was cutting and grinding a carbon stringer and fitting it to the hull. They trusted me to machine millimeters of four feet of gleaming carbon/kevlar L beam. Stefan helped make the mast step structure for the first few days, and then worked on tapping in the rudder bearing. Tapping is the use of carbon strips and epoxy to attach one part of the boat to another. It acts like a weld would in a steel ship.

Matt and I spent most of our first week helping make the cradles that would be the permanent support for the boat whenever it is not in the water. The concept is to build the cradle on the hull, so that it takes the exact hull shape. We planned it all out, and laid the fiberglass cloth dry. We planning to bond the cloth together with epoxy, but instead of putting the epoxy (or goop) on the cloth, we infused it into the cloth. This was done by vacuum bagging the part to the hull surface, and then running a tube from a bucket of resin into the vacuum bag. The vacuum sucked the goop into the cloth and bonded all the layers together.  (Pics to follow)

This week, we flipped the boat.

Satchel and Stefan flipping the boat. Oh and please don't try to steal the boat design from these pictures.