With reference to the spare daggerboard idea. Time, cost, stowage - well you have swallowed time and stowage maybe Schonning should swallow the cost as it was their FU. - even if they handed over cash rather than shipping the materials? You are doing a great job.😀👍
Great video this week, I just did not have any idea how much work has to be done to build a boat! I so admire your determination to do such a large project! I noticed you had a Sisyphus clock in your garage pushing a mighty big stone up the hill, great inspiration! I also enjoyed the bike ride!! Can't wait for the next episode! Have a great week!
Good eye! My parents bought that clock 50 years ago in Germany. I keep it around to remind me that if I keep pushing, eventually I'll reach the top! That has served me well over the years as I take on large projects. Case in point, my first novel series was 2,000 pages long... but I just kept writing a little every day. Now I am nearing the end of my 24th novel. When I'm not building the boat, or working on these videos, I write.
No doubt! I'm more concerned about how to replaced a broken board in some locations. Eventually I would need to build one. They were hard enough where I had access to everything.
@@SailingSVLynx I build a new one on the foredeck of our cat in Fiji. Had a local cabinetmaker glue up a big 11'x2' long blank of tropical hardwood. Then I shaped it with a router on a jig. Glassed it. Took a week because I only had a small 1/4" router with a small bit. So not that bad. Wood and glass are pretty easy to find. Happy building
Phil, I haven't caught up with this episode yet but had a thought that I wanted to run past you as I like the way you analyze things. I fully take on board your kick up rudder ideas for beaching, hitting submerged objects and running aground but that can still leave a problem if say you caught a dagger board on a large submerged tree, sea container and or uncharted reef at say 12 knots. It could easily rip a hole in one or both hulls. If instead you had lifting plates with a pivot to fo'rard often called a centre plate on monohulls that sail in areas that dry out with the tide, that would automatically lift up with forward contact with any solid structure possibly without causing any damage to the hull. They would, of course, require a watertight box along part of the hull for them when in their stowed position but that could be incorporated into a widened bottom part of an internal bulkhead. Also there would no part of the board that would need to come up through and clutter valuable deck space. Anyway that is just an idea and I would appreciate your thoughts on it whether negative or positive 👍🏻
They would work, and there are monohulls with lifting keels that are a similar idea. There is just so much engineering to create them that it is cost and weight prohibitive. Also, in a performance cat, like ours, there just isn't enough room in the bilge. We need all that space for plumbing and various water tanks. Daggerboards are just simpler. They aren't going to put any holes in the boat if we hit something because they are designed to be weaker than the casings and have break away sections that snap off in any impact situation. But, if you were designing a boat from scratch, it is something you could look into, there are just a lot of challenges to solve. It's why I don't know of any catamarans with that kind of setup. The closet one I have seen is an African Cat 605, with side lifting boards, but those aren't break away.
@SailingSVLynx thank you for the time you took to respond to that. Perhaps like the shifting helm wheel positions, once one has done it, then many will do it (the intelligent cow scenario). If they were high aspect they would protrude above the cabin soles less or not at all and would have lower drag. Keep up the good work. 👍🏻
I wish you well in your new design! Some things you will need to consider are how to support the pressure on the board with only a small section above where it exits from the hull. In our cat, that distance is only about a foot or so between the bottom of the bilge and the sole.
@SailingSVLynx You are correct, of course. The lever arm moment would put some hefty strain on the pivot and the top of the board. Lee boards use the side of the boat to assist in that regard. This is not some design I am persuing, instead it is merely a thought excercise that was initiated by your choices for a kick up rudder. Incidentally, I have seen another method of providing grounding protection to a catamaran rudder as shown in the RU-vid channel "Sailing Wild Honey". Each hull is a double ender, somewhat like a Wharham but more conventional looking. The rudder is the articulated rearmost part of each hull which doesn't extend below the bottom of the hull. Clever huh?
A spare dagger board could be fitted up to be used as a passerelle for the 99.99% it's not needed as a dagger board. Design any fittings, fixtures or non-slipto be filled in or ripped off in an emergency.
Interesting video. I'm no engineer, but I would imagine that the supporting framework that holds the dagger board casing would also need to be strengthened if you're strengthening the dagger board. I'm really enjoying following along with your build. Thanks from Cape Town.
I am close to the point of building a new daggerboard for my Catana47. One of the boards was previously spliced as a repair and poorly done as the bottom half just disappeared whilst sailing. We did not hit anything . Just noticed it while diving on the boat. My aim is to pull a mold off the existing good board in 2 halves and then use these molds to make a new board. My spine is a rectangular shape bonded onto to the one half of the board at the highest form of the curve. Our daggerboards are then hollow allowing water to flood them (they have 2 x 10mm holes top and bottom which apparently keeps them down as too light boards float up as you sail. I will use carbon fibre unidirectional for the spine and the shells will be gelcoat then 4x layers of 600gm biaxial and vinylester resin. Our boards are close to 4m long, 60 cm wide and 6cm thick. There is a Catana42 around as well with a missing board so we might make 2 as they are identical. For interests sake the boards are really only effective on our boats whilst beating into wind and then only up to 8 knots SOG then raised. Downwind only if you are struggling to steer in strong following seas then you can drop a third of both boards so I don’t really think you should bother to carry another board the boat will sail fine on one board til you can get somewhere to build another. We are in SE Asia full time cruising
The only reason we might carry a spare board is that making another one in a far away place would be much more difficult. We understand that we can sail with one, but to where? It's a long way back to Los Angeles where we have everything we need to construct a daggerboard. Anywhere else would make building one much more difficult for us.
Adding some strength to your dagger-boards is a wise decision. Its not only that you might not do everything always correctly, but also what happens if you are in a situation when a board has to come up but you can't round up or down to take the pressure off?? When building new Schionning boards I have strengthened them and the dagger-board casing especially where the casing connects to the hull under the waterline at the trailing edge. That's obviously the weakest point. (don't ask how I know) As for spare boards, I only considered to integrate them and mount them to the boom-rack and sail-cover. To have only one spare board the casings would have to be identical, it is rather annoying to deal with a lose board that jiggles loud and happy.
Our casings will be identical (or close enough), as will the two daggerboards in case we need to use a single board to work in either casing. And, fortunately, these daggerboards are symmetrical, so they do work on either side.
I’d highly recommend you build a 3rd daggerboard as a spare while you have the set up and time to do so. So now that you are 1 year into your build do you still think you are only 13-14 months away from the boat being done?
We aren't a year into the build yet, but getting close! At this point, we already noted that we are a few months behind, so we're thinking about 17 months at this point, but only time will tell.
@@SailingSVLynxI think you said in your video the start April 10th, 2023 and your target was 4/10/25 for completion, so I understand how it’s now it’s 8/10/25 with the delays that weren’t accounted for in the original schedule. All good, and hope the rest of the build goes smoothly for you guys 👍🏻
You should consider adding a shear pin to the daggerboard that connects to the hull. The shear pin would be designed to break before the daggerboard and the casing. Of course you will have to keep a supply of shear pins on board and replacing one at night in a squall would be difficult but it is better than not having a daggerboard or carrying an extra 16 foot board.
We aren't sure how a sheer pin would handle the side pressure on a daggerboard when sailing. It is critical that there is enough strength there to handle that, which is why there is a continuous spine and the outer skin of the board, both wrapped in fiberglass (or basalt in our case).
Do you have problem with nitrile medical gloves ripping or tearing when you are working. I can't keep from tearing or rippjng holes in the gloves. I switched to the biggest i can get in philippines but i think they are still to small. I keep getting epoxy on me.
I just found 6 mil and 7 mil and 8 mil thick desposable gloves. Seems to be really tough against tearing or ripping. $7 for a box of 100 here in philippines so i ordered me 2 boxes, one 6 mil and one 7 mil. Got to do something to keep epoxy off my skin.
We have looked at thicker gloves, but they are expensive when you consider how many pairs we go through. Some of them are because they break, but not the majority. So far, in nine months, we have gone through 3,000 pairs of gloves.
We are building a 15m catamaran just now and we are using the nitrile gloves, but first we dress textile safety gloves and over these the nitrile gloves. For us it works fine.🙂
I'm no engineer, but in my head if you want the dagger board to break as a safety feature, it should be designed to be "weak" in one direction only (back and forth), and be strong to lateral forces. Maybe staggering the wood in an alternating order as to create a kind of hinge. This staggered parts would not be glued in their entirety. The basalt outer layer would be then "tuned" with just the right amount of strength. Hoping for better weather 😊Frederick
I think the point Fredrick is making is that we want DB'S to be flexible and strong to resist side loading, but have a weaker resistance to sheer impact loads. By adding skin wraps with basalt you may exceed the sheer force breaking load, which I have seen on a cat with boards that were overbuild. It would be pretty hard to predict what would happen. A consult with a marine composites engineer might be an idea.
@@robthompson7174 At a 15 to 20% increase in strength, the boards are still going to break on impact with something you hit. The casings are also stronger with basalt so they will not be damaged before the board snaps at the designed break point. But, the side loading strength Is also slightly stronger, so the boards will resist an unwanted break due to other forces.
Can you please turn down the music in your edits, when wearing headphones the volume needs to be up to hear the voice dialogue but when you transition to music it is way to loud
Are you serious about building spare daggerboard? Yes, building is exciting but it's a waste of time. I remember myself at that stage where I was so proud of myself that I was in tension to build a spare centerboard for my trimaran. Then measure pros and cons and gave up. The boat could still go if you smashed centerboard or daggerboard to the next port where you would be able to repair it. No reason to waste space and add extra vessel weight. Also daggerboard is designed to work like utility knife. Even if the bottom of it is smashed we could retract more.
Yes, we are serious, but not until the entire boat is finished. If we decide to build a spare daggerboard, it will be while we are doing sea trials, before departing on our voyage. We have considered the extra weight, and that is of more concern to us than the time it will take to build a spare daggerboard. We have to consider the extra weight compared to the difficulty in trying to build a daggerboard in some remote location, without the tools and resources we have now. It is a complex task to build one, and not one easily done in some locations.
