Shop is set up!
It is all here…the shop equipment that is! It’s been a long time coming…over a year now since we’ve started the project and the day has finally come to start doing the real work. We’ve got all the molding materials and have the shop set up to start building things.
The real reason for writing is my visit to ProSoap today. They have great pride in their soap and rightly so. It was cool seeing first hand how everything comes together…from the raw materials to the packaging. And as an added bonus I got to see “Seawolf,” a 40 ft. catamaran which they plan to launch at the end of this month. I’ll make a video of everything I saw today and post it on the new website…hopefully very soon.
Almost ready to build
We are still in the process of getting the shop set up and revamping the website. It will look a little different once its finished. I will post some pictures of the shop and the new design once the new website is ready to go.
New Year and New Records!
Still working on the shop set-up…organizing the workspaces and waiting on the delivery of our bandsaw. It will be the end of the month at least before the bandsaw gets here.
In the meantime it’s been exciting to the follow the progress of the IDEC trimaran and Francis Joyon on his solo round-the-world sailing speed record attempt. He’s due to finish this weekend sometime…smashing the old record by 10 days. Here’s a pic from the website…what an awesome boat!
Ready to build!!!
Most of our composite supplies and hardware tools have arrived. We will start the build after we get things set up.
Congratulations to Sailrocket!!!
Congratulations to Paul Larsen and the team of SAILROCKET for reaching a peak speed of 42.4 knots recently down in Walvis Bay, Namibia. I wish you the best and look forward to reading more good news. Here’s a pic of SAILROCKET from their website.
Refining the design
We have been acquiring materials and some new power tools for the prototype build and should soon have the shop up and running. We have been refining the design beyond the initial conceptual models shown on this website. In the meantime we will continue to develop the complex theoretical models of the sailboat’s behavior in order to accurately characterize and predict its behavior (including its speed) before building the scale prototype. We will post pictures and narrated videos of the new design soon, hopefully by the end of December. Happy Holidays!
Budget and supplies (i.e. THE PLAN)
We’ve recently completed our modeling and simulation contract with the US Air Force with tremendous success. It’ll give us time to pursue the sailboat project…among many other cool things. The shop is slowly but surely coming together. As mentioned before we have the drill press and the sander. Now we need some wood, glue, fasteners, etc. - not to mention a band saw - to start building the molds.
The game plan is to use Solidworks to generate several closely spaced frame section templates for the various sailboat components in order to accurately build male plugs. We will then build shells of the various components using a wet lay-up of either E-glass/epoxy or graphite/epoxy composite (depending on cost)…which will result in a very lightweight and stiff sailboat model with very clean lines. We will add stiffeners and electronics per the design, which we can’t share with you just yet ;-)
The past months have seen a lot of growth within the company and the local Dallas office. They’ve both doubled in size! We’ve had tremendous success using our modeling and simulation tools to generate high fidelity simulations and realistic visualizations. Our successes have the added benefit of enabling us to refine the sailboat design. We will use our simulation tools to predict and validate various design parameters to maximize the sailboat’s speed and controllability. The goal of the scale model is to demonstrate the concept and the feasibility of building and sailing a full size version. But for fun and because we can, we are considering competing in this autonomous transatlantic sailboat race. The results from last year’s race off of Aberystwyth, UK, can be found here:
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New shop equipment
We’ve recently obtained a small drill press and oscillating spindle sander for our new shop, which is located right next to White Rock Lake in Dallas, TX (see below).
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