This is
the story of the first sailboat I built. It was in the 2004 when I
was a mechanical engineering student. At the time, small sporty boats
were in my dreams, like the Open 5.70 by Jean Marie Finot or the
Speedfeet 18 by Marc Lombard. This wonderful little sportboats were, of course, out of my reach with their price of about 20000 Euro. But
I could not stop dreaming and I was searching the boatbuilding forums
and blogs. Then I found the pages of Cantierino, the italian DIY
boatbuilding site with lots of amateur builder experiences. I found
the software Carene, with which it's easy to design a simple plywood
hull for the stitch and glue method. I found Spray store – an
online shop which had Epoxy resin, glass fibers, and other
boatbuilding materials.
The
building site is always a problem. I could not find an empty, dry and
warm place to build my boat. I had a friend who lived with his
parents and they had a big, empty ground floor. I talked to him, and
they allowed me to use it for few months. I prepared some drawings
with Autocad. Before the start I talked to a friend who was a naval
architecture student and to his father who was an experienced
boatbuilder and sailor. They did some calculations, gave me few
suggestions and said that the plans were OK.
I ordered the materials
and bought some plywood by the local store and the building adventure
could start. I bought 9 peaces of 8 mm thick okume (marine grade)
plywood of the dimensions of 2,5 x 1,7 m. I transported them on the
roof of my Renault 4 to my “shipyard”.
First I
transferred the lines from the plans to the plywood. Then I cut the
parts with the jigsaw. I glued the long hull parts with an
overlapping joint. I glued wooden strips along the borders of the
bulkheads. I built a simple V-stand to support the bottom. I stitched
the sides of the bottom and glued them together. After it, I
proceeded with the vertical elements. The internal volumes are
covered with resin and protected with paint before closing them. The
outside was completely laminated with resin impregnated glass fabric. In the
end the hull was painted for aesthetic and protective reasons.
I cant
find the original drawings any more, but the dimensions were 4.85 m
length with a width of 2.16 m. I named it Mića, which means "little" in the local dialect. I turned it over with the help of some
friends. A text about it can be found on the Cantierino pages here: http://www.cantierino.it/Aesperienze/Mica/Micia.html.
For the hull it took me about 250 hours. Afterward, I bought a used mast
of a 470 dinghy and an old set of sails. I bought also an old trailer
and a used Mercury 3.3 outboard engine. It took me some more time to
build the centerboard, the rudder and to put all together.
Overall it was an extraordinary experience which I would repeat. And
I did. I will describe also the other building experiences in some next posts.
The sequence of building is presented in the following pictures.
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