Building The Mast for Harrigami.

Reports: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Week 15: Monday 10th Mar - Friday 14th Mar 2003

If you are wondering what this boat will look like once completed then look at the CAD images in the Walk through cockpit version of Harrigami Gallery.

More mast making this week. The mast is 12m long and tapered. A female mould is required with 23 mould stations with a reducing radius. This has to be very straight and rigid so we used the rails from our original strongback set on the strip making table. The plywood mould stations were cut and set up with two stringlines keeping everything straight and level. The carbon strips were cleaned, sanded and laid into the mould using hot glue to keep them in place. Medium density bog was squeegeed in between the strips before laying three layers of 200 gm carbon fibre clothcovered in peel ply.

When cured the half mast was removed and set aside for the process to be repeated again for the other half. This time some flanges has to be built onto the mould so the cloth could be extended up past the join to form a gluing surface. When the cloth had been laid and was still green we spread glue onto the join and joined the two halves. The outside surface was cleaned up and the strip joins bogged ready for the outside laminates.

This all took us most of the week though we are developing techniques to speed up the process. We also did more fairing in the cockpit and a number of other detail jobs.

Hours : 1245

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