FLOORING, GIRDERS and BULKHEADS

This is a later photo of the prob being installed through the bow and collision bulkhead, made of prelaminated 8mm  foam and gives structural integrity to the bow. The tube goes through the nose cone and holds the self furling prod connecting the jib. A neat tool called the" baked bean stick", ( a strip of perspex with an edge of teeth), marked onto the mdf bulkhead pattern as you would with a scribe making offsets, giving you the outline to mark onto cardboard. Atleast it gives you a good pattern to work with.


 Once the collision bulkhead was in place the foam flooring was glued in. Four Strips of 8mm foam hot glued on one another and rounded edges run along the hull athwart-ship and one fore and aft making contact with the bulkheads. The forces of waves smashing into the boat acts like a shock wave through the hull and gets absorbed.

Vacuum bagging the flooring: first the uni-directional carbon fibre is wetted and brushed onto the flooring, then 240gm EDB fibreglass is wet through covering the flooring with 20-30mm either side on the hull. The peel ply has been cut back to allow for this. Peel-ply brushed on the glass all over ensuring no air is between the coving and fibre matt.
Perforated plastic lays ontop of that.
The green stuff is simple shade cloth like from the hardware strore which helps soak up excess resin and allows the air to suck evenly throughout. The plastic sheet is carefully attached to the "vac tape",( bitumen rubber tape) with little "darts" where nececssary to allow for the bag to suck perfectly onto the floor.

You can see the flooring in this picture and the carbon tape is obvious. The cardboard is because we're messy pricks : ) and need a bib when doing messy jobs like making a flange around the topsides. Two strips of 50mm 400EDB tape halved down the middle and glued inside this MDF rim with pee-lply on it. Somehow we did it without any airpockets in the resin.. got pretty dizzy doing this upside down though. Since we are unable to get inside the boat and reach any further than station 11 to cove the deck to the topsides we loaded a 50mm flange with glue which made a good contact between the topsides and deck.

The Girder running fore and aft contacting the centre-case and transom gives stiffness to the cockpit sole and supports human body weight. The Bulkhead running athwart-ship is also load bearing and both structures lofted from AutoCAD and prelaminated before putting in situation.

There's another flange meeting the topside. Looks a bit messy but the rough bits will be chopped off. There's a carbon fibre tube to be coved in the join of these two flanges.