I find fascinating that Phill gets the time to fully explain his thought process behind every aspect of this build and what he does to overcome the challenges and limitations faced by amateur boat builders. I think this adds tremendous value to the channel.
Happy to see you have lots of air cond. For me its #1 on a boat , its what makes any boat sleepable, otherwise the humidity makes you miserable, theres nothing worse than taking a shower only to start sweating like your in a steam sauna . Great job and planning .
Hi again guys. I wondered how much care you were taking to protect your exposed epoxy surfaces from UV damage? I read recently that the Gougeon brothers said as little as 200 hours could start to do significant damage. Keep up the good work guys. You are rapidly getting to be my fav catamaran build channel. At 56 years old I feel I could face a build myself now after watching your progress
As much as we can. We use tarps over sections we aren't working on, but there is only so much we can do since the city won't let us put up any kind of tent.
Looking good! Hats off to you guys for being so diligent and dedicated to this project! It would appear you’ve got roughly 4 years left of build and commissioning at this rate, keep up the great work 💪🏼👍
@@SailingSVLynx hope so! I’m just estimating based on how long our boat took from when it was in the same spot. I’m guessing this is why you stopped doing progress vs timeline updates in your videos, but all good part of the fun is the experience of building it yourself and knowing you are doing it right 👍🏻
@@kirkb3473 Not in the slightest. I stopped because it was taking too much of my time to track every hour of everyone's time. You imply I'm trying to hide something.
@@SailingSVLynx no sir, not at all. You guys had made a video contest about your finish date is all & that’s great that you’re saying you are still on target to finish next year. Keep up the good work 👍🏻
@@kirkb3473 Hey Kirk. No, we haven't really said we are still on target. Last that I reported, we figured we were behind by a few months and decided to re-evaluate where we are this coming October or November. If we have the outer shell completed by then (that's the goal), then we think we can better estimate the rest. Still, even then, it's all an estimate by people who have not built this size boat before. In the end, it will be done when it's done. Remember the original estimates were based on how many man hours Schionning thinks it takes to build one of these kits. But maybe we're not as efficient as they expect.
Glad to hear you Phil and Brian are healthy and doing better! quick question/comment…For the fresh water tank areas, why no just getting those bilge areas glassed and properly sealed (make them the actual tanks) instead of inserting the tanks in them? Love the channel a how you guys explain everything!
I want to say this is a really interesting project. And my thoughts can be thrown in the garbage if you like. But sometimes it does struggle to hold my attention and the reason for that is you spend so much time explaining what's going on, approximately 25 minutes of this most recent video verses about 5 minutes showing the actual build occurring. Again an amazing project and I will continue to watch but I thought I'd offer my thoughts for you to do with as you will
Sorry about that, but we're kind of damned if we do and damned if we don't. The issue is simply that building a kit boat like this often involves slow and repetitive work. For example, this week, one day we just cut cloth for eight hours straight. Showing more than about 30 seconds of scissors cutting cloth would be boring beyond belief. Another day we just tabbed bulkheads all day. Again, showing us putting on epoxy and glass over and over, would be boring, so we show about a minute of that work. So to keep the video from just showing repetitive work we try to explain what we are doing, why we choose certain things, how we solve issues, and a little about our future plans. But, certain people aren't going to like us talking this much. Hence, we can't make everyone happy. But, our channel currently gets an average approval rating of 99.2%, so unless that drops (or until we get to more interesting work days) we'll just keep on going this way. We thank you for watching though, and hope we can get to more interesting boat building for you soon.
Good to see you back to work full time, hope no I’ll effects from Covid. I’m sure your following the design but I would much rather cut the top of the bulkhead off in for the fore beam and not weaken the beam . Then you could have bonded the beam to the bulkhead with continuous over the top reinforcement. Fill in deck support part of bulkhead after. But Everything is so overbuilt that it won’t matter either way. I can see now why the final weight on the Schooning boats is so high. Cheers Warren
I'm not sure why you think the weight is high, compared to which cat? An HH50 OC is 2,000 pounds heavier. A Leopard 50 is 18,000 pounds heavier, both weigh more than our Solitaire 1520 (also a 50' boat).
@@SailingSVLynx Hi, re weight, the building method requires so many pieces to put it together , each one requiring secondary bonds. If you build in a more monolithic structure the entire boat is the structure. The design weight of the hull is only a number, what is the real number when boat is finished? That will be the true test. Example , The hull made with all the strips and the filler /glue between the strips is so heavy compared to bending sheets of foam over the mold and laminating. ( yes shape issues). The weight of your front beam? What’s the point of using carbon when you have all that heavy wood in it? Why not build a foam shape and cover that with much cheaper unidirectional glass/carbon ? It could be much lighter and easily as strong designed right. And no risk of rot of wood over time. No matter how much you encapsulate wood with epoxy every fastening or hole is a potential rot risk. With all the old boats I’ve had or fixed it’s always the wood in a fiberglass boat that rots. Don’t get me wrong , you are doing a fabulous job in very difficult circumstances but there are better ways to build that make keeping the weight down easier. I’ve spent many years in the composites industry from a lowly laminator to a business owner building everything from low end decorative covers , heavy duty structures , to light aircraft parts so I do understand the processes. I try to make any comments to be helpful and encouraging. I hope that’s how they come across. Keep up the good work! Cheers Warren Ps re your examples , an HH 50 is a much bigger boat with a lot more interior, the leopard in the best will in the world is not in the performance league , you boat should be something like 1/3 less weight ( and I’ve not looked at the numbers) . W
@@Cheers_Warren Within reason, we already know the weight of the boat from previously finished models (like the Schionning 1490 built in Thailand), so that includes all the elements you are talking about. As for changing out any of the materials, we stick with Schionning's plans, as they have 400 boats built with their system (no forebeam failures to date, after 35 years). We went with Schionning because their boats are considered some of the strongest and safest built cats in the industry (and, in many cases, fastest).
Always a joy to see your project developing, though I'm heading to have built my boat by a boat yard and one size smaller. I wonder why one shouldn't fill those fully sealed flotation compartments with something like table tennis balls. They would keep up most of the buoyancy in case of an leak and are not annoying during the repair. Their weight is neglectable.
Let's see... .095 oz per table tennis ball, about 535 balls fit in a cubic foot. Just one compartment watertight compartment in the bow is 27 cubic feet, so, ((.095 oz x 535) x 27)/16 = 87.767 lbs, It's a catamaran, so one of those compartments in each hull, so times two equals about 176 lbs. But, there are far more watertight compartments... so you can see where this is going. Filling them all with table tennis balls would add hundreds of pounds to a catamaran that must be kept light.
Probably a silly question, but just looking at the power lines in the street, have you checked that this huge boat can actually be transported to the water from there ? 🙂
Chinese. We looked into a few different options for 48vdc A/C units, one in the US, one in Italy, and Chinese A/C units. The US was only cooling, not heat, so we ruled them out. They Italian system looked good, but cost an arm and a leg. We even looked into getting in on a group buy deal that sailing channel Dauntless mentioned. The issue there was that it was an American company playing middleman. The good part was, they took the risk and hassles of dealing with buying from China so you didn't have to do that. The bad news was, they have to make their profit as well, so the price was much more than buying direct from China. Since I have already had many dealings with China on other products and know the process, I decided to just order directly. That turned out to get me the best price, about 25% of the cost of buying from the US 'Dauntless' deal and even a better than Italian company price. Only time will tell if these savings were worth it, meaning how well they perform and last. I will report more on the performance as soon as we install them. If they seem to work well, I'll talk about where we got them on our videos and add contact links. Until then, I don't want to recommend them to anyone. On paper and looking over since receiving them, I will say that they look good so far. They are made for a marine environment and we hope they work out in use.
@@SailingSVLynx Yeah - I was part of that Dauntless deal as well. Until critical mass could not be reached. I’m curious if the units you have ordered will automatically cycle the water pumps on and off as needed. That’s a big part of the energy savings.
Balsa is another option, (other woods would be way too heavy for a performance/cruising catamaran). Balsa comes out to about the same weight as the foam. It has it's advantages and disadvantages. But we like foam because it is less likely to rot if water gets past the fiberglass. Of course, built properly, that won't happen. But there were other reasons we liked the foam, the panels were much larger which meant there were far fewer seams we had to glue together.
We're not experts in vacuum bagging, and when done poorly it can cause weak parts. Hand rolling is more likely to get us amature builders stronger parts and only adds a little weight, especially since vacuum bagging would only be useful in a few places since the majority of the foam parts were vacuum bagged at the manufacturer.
I find fascinating that Phill gets the time to fully explain his thought process behind every aspect of this build and what he does to overcome the challenges and limitations faced by amateur boat builders. I think this adds tremendous value to the channel.
We're glad you enjoy the videos!
Man, every inch of this boat has great build tips.
We try our best :)
Happy to see you have lots of air cond. For me its #1 on a boat , its what makes any boat sleepable, otherwise the humidity makes you miserable, theres nothing worse than taking a shower only to start sweating like your in a steam sauna . Great job and planning .
Yeah, the Admiral would not have been happy without it!
Hi again guys. I wondered how much care you were taking to protect your exposed epoxy surfaces from UV damage? I read recently that the Gougeon brothers said as little as 200 hours could start to do significant damage. Keep up the good work guys. You are rapidly getting to be my fav catamaran build channel. At 56 years old I feel I could face a build myself now after watching your progress
As much as we can. We use tarps over sections we aren't working on, but there is only so much we can do since the city won't let us put up any kind of tent.
Looking good! Hats off to you guys for being so diligent and dedicated to this project! It would appear you’ve got roughly 4 years left of build and commissioning at this rate, keep up the great work 💪🏼👍
Thanks, but appearances can be deceiving.
@@SailingSVLynx hope so! I’m just estimating based on how long our boat took from when it was in the same spot. I’m guessing this is why you stopped doing progress vs timeline updates in your videos, but all good part of the fun is the experience of building it yourself and knowing you are doing it right 👍🏻
@@kirkb3473 Not in the slightest. I stopped because it was taking too much of my time to track every hour of everyone's time. You imply I'm trying to hide something.
@@SailingSVLynx no sir, not at all. You guys had made a video contest about your finish date is all & that’s great that you’re saying you are still on target to finish next year. Keep up the good work 👍🏻
@@kirkb3473 Hey Kirk. No, we haven't really said we are still on target. Last that I reported, we figured we were behind by a few months and decided to re-evaluate where we are this coming October or November. If we have the outer shell completed by then (that's the goal), then we think we can better estimate the rest. Still, even then, it's all an estimate by people who have not built this size boat before. In the end, it will be done when it's done. Remember the original estimates were based on how many man hours Schionning thinks it takes to build one of these kits. But maybe we're not as efficient as they expect.
good to see Brian again!
Yeah, I needed to get him back to building the boat! No rest for the wicked!
Welcome back Brian, we missed you! 💪😊👍 wow it must be hot judging by how liquid that epoxy is...
Yeah, too hot. It's slowing up our progress some as we can't epoxy if it gets too hot and we have lots to epoxy!
@SailingSVLynx doing a great job guys 👌
Glad to hear you Phil and Brian are healthy and doing better!
quick question/comment…For the fresh water tank areas, why no just getting those bilge areas glassed and properly sealed (make them the actual tanks) instead of inserting the tanks in them?
Love the channel a
how you guys explain everything!
Well, we aren't inserting tanks, we are building them right into the compartments as you noted. :)
Is it an indication of how much work there is to do, that if you can’t do one job , there’s always another one waiting to be done 😃🍻
Lots to go, that's for sure.
I want to say this is a really interesting project. And my thoughts can be thrown in the garbage if you like. But sometimes it does struggle to hold my attention and the reason for that is you spend so much time explaining what's going on, approximately 25 minutes of this most recent video verses about 5 minutes showing the actual build occurring. Again an amazing project and I will continue to watch but I thought I'd offer my thoughts for you to do with as you will
Sorry about that, but we're kind of damned if we do and damned if we don't. The issue is simply that building a kit boat like this often involves slow and repetitive work. For example, this week, one day we just cut cloth for eight hours straight. Showing more than about 30 seconds of scissors cutting cloth would be boring beyond belief. Another day we just tabbed bulkheads all day. Again, showing us putting on epoxy and glass over and over, would be boring, so we show about a minute of that work. So to keep the video from just showing repetitive work we try to explain what we are doing, why we choose certain things, how we solve issues, and a little about our future plans. But, certain people aren't going to like us talking this much. Hence, we can't make everyone happy. But, our channel currently gets an average approval rating of 99.2%, so unless that drops (or until we get to more interesting work days) we'll just keep on going this way. We thank you for watching though, and hope we can get to more interesting boat building for you soon.
Looking forward to the plumbing and electrical.
Me too, want to help? ;)
Great video thanks 👍🏻
Our pleasure, thanks for watching.
Good to see you back to work full time, hope no I’ll effects from Covid.
I’m sure your following the design but I would much rather cut the top of the bulkhead off in for the fore beam and not weaken the beam . Then you could have bonded the beam to the bulkhead with continuous over the top reinforcement. Fill in deck support part of bulkhead after.
But Everything is so overbuilt that it won’t matter either way.
I can see now why the final weight on the Schooning boats is so high.
Cheers Warren
I'm not sure why you think the weight is high, compared to which cat? An HH50 OC is 2,000 pounds heavier. A Leopard 50 is 18,000 pounds heavier, both weigh more than our Solitaire 1520 (also a 50' boat).
@@SailingSVLynx Hi, re weight, the building method requires so many pieces to put it together , each one requiring secondary bonds. If you build in a more monolithic structure the entire boat is the structure.
The design weight of the hull is only a number, what is the real number when boat is finished? That will be the true test.
Example , The hull made with all the strips and the filler /glue between the strips is so heavy compared to bending sheets of foam over the mold and laminating. ( yes shape issues).
The weight of your front beam? What’s the point of using carbon when you have all that heavy wood in it? Why not build a foam shape and cover that with much cheaper unidirectional glass/carbon ? It could be much lighter and easily as strong designed right. And no risk of rot of wood over time.
No matter how much you encapsulate wood with epoxy every fastening or hole is a potential rot risk. With all the old boats I’ve had or fixed it’s always the wood in a fiberglass boat that rots.
Don’t get me wrong , you are doing a fabulous job in very difficult circumstances but there are better ways to build that make keeping the weight down easier. I’ve spent many years in the composites industry from a lowly laminator to a business owner building everything from low end decorative covers , heavy duty structures , to light aircraft parts so I do understand the processes.
I try to make any comments to be helpful and encouraging. I hope that’s how they come across.
Keep up the good work!
Cheers Warren
Ps re your examples , an HH 50 is a much bigger boat with a lot more interior, the leopard in the best will in the world is not in the performance league , you boat should be something like 1/3 less weight ( and I’ve not looked at the numbers) . W
@@Cheers_Warren Within reason, we already know the weight of the boat from previously finished models (like the Schionning 1490 built in Thailand), so that includes all the elements you are talking about. As for changing out any of the materials, we stick with Schionning's plans, as they have 400 boats built with their system (no forebeam failures to date, after 35 years). We went with Schionning because their boats are considered some of the strongest and safest built cats in the industry (and, in many cases, fastest).
@@SailingSVLynx it will certainly be strong . I’m sure it will work out for you
W
Always a joy to see your project developing, though I'm heading to have built my boat by a boat yard and one size smaller.
I wonder why one shouldn't fill those fully sealed flotation compartments with something like table tennis balls. They would keep up most of the buoyancy in case of an leak and are not annoying during the repair. Their weight is neglectable.
closed cell foam is cheaper and just as good
Let's see... .095 oz per table tennis ball, about 535 balls fit in a cubic foot. Just one compartment watertight compartment in the bow is 27 cubic feet, so, ((.095 oz x 535) x 27)/16 = 87.767 lbs, It's a catamaran, so one of those compartments in each hull, so times two equals about 176 lbs. But, there are far more watertight compartments... so you can see where this is going. Filling them all with table tennis balls would add hundreds of pounds to a catamaran that must be kept light.
@@SailingSVLynx Ok, thank you for doing the math for me. I'm totally surprised by the weight of innocent table tennis balls when they come in mass.😳
Probably a silly question, but just looking at the power lines in the street, have you checked that this huge boat can actually be transported to the water from there ? 🙂
Fortunately, there are no power lines in the alley where we need to lift the boat. And yes, we had a crane company estimate the job already.
@@SailingSVLynx Whew. I am relieved 😌
What brand are those air conditioners? Do you have a link to them by chance? Thanks, Zeke
Chinese. We looked into a few different options for 48vdc A/C units, one in the US, one in Italy, and Chinese A/C units. The US was only cooling, not heat, so we ruled them out. They Italian system looked good, but cost an arm and a leg. We even looked into getting in on a group buy deal that sailing channel Dauntless mentioned. The issue there was that it was an American company playing middleman. The good part was, they took the risk and hassles of dealing with buying from China so you didn't have to do that. The bad news was, they have to make their profit as well, so the price was much more than buying direct from China. Since I have already had many dealings with China on other products and know the process, I decided to just order directly. That turned out to get me the best price, about 25% of the cost of buying from the US 'Dauntless' deal and even a better than Italian company price. Only time will tell if these savings were worth it, meaning how well they perform and last. I will report more on the performance as soon as we install them. If they seem to work well, I'll talk about where we got them on our videos and add contact links. Until then, I don't want to recommend them to anyone. On paper and looking over since receiving them, I will say that they look good so far. They are made for a marine environment and we hope they work out in use.
@@SailingSVLynx Yeah - I was part of that Dauntless deal as well. Until critical mass could not be reached. I’m curious if the units you have ordered will automatically cycle the water pumps on and off as needed. That’s a big part of the energy savings.
would it not have been better to choose wood as base material ?
Balsa is another option, (other woods would be way too heavy for a performance/cruising catamaran). Balsa comes out to about the same weight as the foam. It has it's advantages and disadvantages. But we like foam because it is less likely to rot if water gets past the fiberglass. Of course, built properly, that won't happen. But there were other reasons we liked the foam, the panels were much larger which meant there were far fewer seams we had to glue together.
Why not vacuum bagging those parts?
We're not experts in vacuum bagging, and when done poorly it can cause weak parts. Hand rolling is more likely to get us amature builders stronger parts and only adds a little weight, especially since vacuum bagging would only be useful in a few places since the majority of the foam parts were vacuum bagged at the manufacturer.