![]() ![]() To date, the sizes up to 36' have been built without the aid of cranes and expensive handling equipment. Anyone who has spent time maintaining any vessel of any material will know what I mean! ![]() Brent's message of simplicity is to build only the size you need. Anything bigger than that is bound to be more taxing upon the builder, both during the building process and in use. The 31 footer can be built by one person, and can easily be solo handled the 36 footer is easier for two to build, and is ideal for two to sail the 40 is a bigger affair, and I'll be taking my family along (though it should be easily handled by two). Interestingly, this corresponds nicely to the practical limit for each boat in terms of use and crew. Size limits: There isn't technically really a size limit on building these boats (I've heard of a 50 foot aluminum being built up northern Vancouver Island), but there is a practical limit to how big of a piece the builder would like to work with. He does recommend spot welding the nuts to the bolts on the come-a-long as a safety measure, however (that way the nut can't undo itself over time). Brent Swain, the designer, has found through long experience that even a cheap come-a-long has the power to pull the steel into shape, and this works even when pulling the hull skin around the transom, which is quite a tight curve. Even an 8 foot bar of 3/16th inch steel can be bent by hand around a fixed object quite easily. A 36 foot piece of steel is quite floppy, actually, and does most of its curving without much need for encouragement. Anything left after that can then be focussed on and attended to, though it is unlikely this would be needed to any high degree on an origami boat.Įase of bending steel: The longer the piece, the easier it is to bend, since the curve is quite flat. In this way, the fairing is "automatic" and you won't be chasing shadows - sometimes any attempt to fair can end up making a real hash of it. Why? In most cases a quick sanding in preparation for painting will remove the unfairness you may have detected, because the unfairness is more often only as unfair as the thickness of your paint layers. He cautions that before attacking a hull with epoxy fairing compounds as is commonly done on steel boats, the owner should hold off. Brent has mentioned in his book that even if you do see a small amount of unfairness after the first paint job (the human eye can detect unfairness to a very high degree), just wait until the next time you paint. This hull was not faired with anything other than paint. I'm not sure if it is the best picture to show my point, but if you look along the side of the hull, you can see no ripples or distortions in the reflective surface. The attached photo of Moonraven, a 36 footer do Swain's design in Comox, BC, shows how fair the hull can be. The use of large pieces of steel for each side saves a lot of welding, which in turn saves a lot of distortion from welding heat. Once the hull is welded together, there is no need to do any fairing with putties the way traditional steel boats are. ![]() Bending it into a curve, you'll see no humps and hollows. For an example of this, take any long stiff length of material such as an aluminum ruler, a wooden batten, or even a strip of plexiglass. It is a material of uniform consistency, so will bend into a mathematically perfect curve. This means that the full length (31' to 40') piece of steel for each side (each side is built on its own initially) acts as a very long "batten" (see "building sequence" in the photos section of the group). I don't have access to any information from the registrant, since it is Yahoo which hosts to group's space.įairness: The hulls pull together in a fair curve simply because there are no transverse frames welded to the skin to distort it from a) heat distortion and b) thickening the hull where there frame would be welded on, making the skin material non-uniform. Registration on yahoo group: In the same way people register on this forum, I set it up this way in order to keep a lid on spam and viral attacks from anonymous e-mailers. I'll attempt to answer a few questions as well as I can: Thanks for alerting me to the responses here, Stephen, as I had not looked here for awhile, and had no idea of the activity happening here! ![]()
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