At the jetty

As you can see the bow is really high in Linnea. We need to use some sort of ladder to board her when laying at a jetty like this. As you can see the bow is floating really high. The mast will lower it significantly. But I think we need to put some ballast there as well. At least until we start to use the storage large compartment at the bow.

Put on the last oil on the mast today. Joel helped out. Tomorrow I will make the hardware for the mast top out of oak.

In the water

So here it is. She is floating really high at the bow because we haven’t stepped the mast yet and we also have a big empty stowage compartement at the bows.

The bleeding of the diesel took a couple of hours, as allways. I opened the wrong bolt and let some air in at the wrong place. So even though we bleeded it later at the right place and at the injectors it was blocked before the pump. Anyway. Now it runs great.

Stop the presses – Linnea hits the water!

She floats, doesn’t leak and the engine needs a bleeding. Hopefully I’ll publish some pictures tonight.

The sail!

Now we try to cut back on things that are not really needed to do trial sails. And we try to find stuff that really needs to be finished before we can sail. So the sail itself has quite high priorities. So after giving the mast some more Owatrol we brought out the sail to sew the last (top) panel to it.

Maybe we are overdoing it a little, but instead of tripple stitching we actually sew the top panel woth five. What to call that? Quint-stitch? It was because the batten reinforcement that covered the tripple stitching added two more rows. Maybe this sail and I can celebrate our retierment together in about 30 years.

I should explain everything about making a junk sail, because it is really quite simple and fun. Maybe that is the explanation why sail makers get so angry when they hear about junk sails. Maybe I’ll fill in some more info later. But for now I can say that we use Top Gun as recommended by Tom Colvin. It is cheap, quite soft like cotton and doesn’t need to be covered from the sun. Sewing a 800 sq ft sail from ordinary sail cloth would be much more difficult. Top Gun is polyester, just like ordinary dacron, but it isn’t hard like heat treated dacron. It is also covered in acrylic or something similar for UV-resistance.

You don’t need to be able to spread the whole sail to sew a junk sail.

Essential reading.

I love our machine. Sailrite Ultrafeed, walking foot heavy duty.

The top panel ready for sewing. Clamped up to fit under the arm of the machine.

The only difficult thing with sewing the sail is to move the heavy cloth while sewing. The only boring thing is creasing the cloth.

We will rope the sail with 10 mm three strand rope. Sew the grommets at the top and use spur grommets everywhere else.

Now the next step is reinforcement patches. I am thinking about a good looking shape. Maybe round, but it might be hard to fold the round edge while sewing.

The tiller!

On this picture the tiller looks a bit slim but in reality it is quite hefty. It is laminated from ash.

No launch today

We planned on launching the boat today. My father waited for the guy with the crane while I was at work, but he didn’t have time to do it, since he had to fix some motor boats. So, maybe monday, since tomorrow is midsummer.

Picture proof of speed with baggy sails

This is pictures of Samson. A Norwegian ferro cement boat from Stavanger. It is a great boat of with a pig fence as stanchions and Ikea stuff in the cabin and you can sit in chairs on deck, while sailing insore in the beutiful Norwegian inshore waters. I sailed with it a couple of years ago and even though it has a SA/D ratio* of only 13 it has a lot of power in light winds. This is clearly seen in the pictures.

As can also bee seen in the pictures, the sails are baggy. They are also made of quite stretchy mateial, probably nylon.

So if you sew your junk sails with camber between the battens, the sail will give more power at the same wind speed.

So, camber is good? Yeah, probably. Will I use it? No. I try to not modify stuff before I try it out. The SA/D of Linnea is 17, so a flat sail will still have quite a lot of power. So, we will see if flat is ennough power. Otherwise I could resew the sail.

* SA/D=Sail Area vs Displacement ratio. Since the sail is two dimensional and the hull is three dimensional, the formula is SA/D^2/3. Otherwise the sail area and hull wouldn’t scale equally.

Bamboo batten blues

We have this German bamboo place. They can supply any bamboo we want at a much lower price than any other battens. The problem is that the 60-80 mm battens we want to use for the uppermost battens are only available by September. So maybe we will double up 45-50 mm battens until then. One at each side of the sail, for example. And then add thicker ones later, if needed. I don’t really trust the bamboo battens calculations anyway so experementing with different thicknesses might be the best way to deal with it.

Window frames too expensive

We made some really nice plugs to forge the port hole frames in the deck house from bronze. Found a nice place where they made sculptures our of silicon bronze. They recently made a nice one of Astrid Lindgren. They understood what we wanted, 12 really simple frames of bronze. Everything seemed ok. … until we got the price quote. Too expensive for now. So we are thinking about overlaping the lexan on the inside, and make an inside frame, thick as the hull to hold it. It will probably look ugly, so we keep thinking about this one. Any good ideas, anyone?

Tiller thriller

Ok, it wasn’t really a thriller. I just thought it sounded funny. Today we finnished the routing and sanding of the laminated ash tiller. Now comes a couple of coats of epoxy and then clear polyurethane.

We will bore the rudder head from the top down through the tiller to be able to be able to secure it with a bronze rod or something. That way we will be able to quickly unmount it when we want to set a table for eight people on deck, or something.