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EeZeBilts From Keil Kraft

Now we are on the home straight! We have a drawing, a reasonable structure, and we can start pulling out the detail. It's at this stage that I usually confuse myself completely, since I will make numerous slight alterations to put bulkheads and formers in better positions for several reasons - internal layout, better strength and balance.... and I end up with several dozen slightly different hull designs, each of which are slightly incompatible with numerous slightly different bulkheads, and I then lose track of which parts go with which others... However, here are some examples of the output from this stage. The superstructure base(fig32) is going to have to be made from parts as I mentioned earlier. The bulkheads (fig33) can now all be drawn with their slots and tabs, ready for assembling into the classic egg-box on the sub-deck (fig34). The front formers and the keel are taken off the drawing, again with tabs drawn (fig35)... There will be quite a number of other parts to be drawn and made - the transom and other flat sections of the stern, the triangular bulkheads under the subdeck, the which go to make up the funnel and mast, and other details like the anchor well. Almost all of these parts will be uninteresting rectangles with dimensions taken off the drawing, so I am not going to list them all down here. The full set of parts, however, will be needed when it comes to the cutting stage, because we will be trying to get as little wastage as possible from the balsa, and sneaking little triangular formers into all available gaps on the sheets. I will take a bit of a break now, because I need to get the water-jets delivered before doing the final stern design - and I am running short of balsa, so I will need more of that! I may cut a few parts on a sheet of 1/8" inch as an illustration. To do this you simply arrange the parts you want into a 4"x36" rectangle, load the cutter with a 4"x35" balsa sheet and send a file describing the parts to the cutter over a USB link. We will cover the software used and the stages of converting the drawing file to cutting instructions at that point...

5 years ago by DodgyGeezer