Wrap it up…no really, wrap it up

If you follow any of the threads on the Bateau forum you may have seen we ran into a discrepancy on the keel plans. It appears we received a set of plans that when being plotted at the printer the page may have been reduced to fit instead of full size. No big deal if you are just reading measurements and notations on a set of plans but there is a full size template on them that we copied and used to shape our keel. This only became obvious when we started working on the keel box and the fit was going to be sloppy at best. The guys at Bateau, Jacques and Evan, went right to work with us on the problem and decided we could wrap the existing keel in 5 more rounds of the 12 oz biaxial fabric and bring the strength up to the requirement. The shape will be only slightly different than designed and if you understand foils then note we now have a NACA 0013 instead of a 0012 (if you don’t understand foils you will need to do your own research as I certainly am not the one to explain it).This will have no effect on the keels efficiency I am told so this is the course of action we will take.

The material should arrive early next week and as this is one of those items that is not available locally no work on the keel box can move forward without a finished keel and without the keel box we can’t install the center section of the sole and so on. What I can do is get a few small things done such as fitting the spinnaker pole frame and support along with cutting the holes where the pole will slide in and out.

Although we are taking a small step back on the keel our biggest reason for being behind schedule is not related to the project itself but due more to involvement or distractions from other things. I have accepted that it may very well be the first of the year before the boat is ready now. The local drought has left our lakes at record lows anyway and even if the project were completed today we wouldn’t be able to splash the boat without traveling quite some distance.

There is no additional time on the actual build to add at this time but I suspect before the weekend is over I’ll have a few new pictures and some progress to report.