These sport boat designs represent a significant step up from what most people think of when picturing home-built boats. The combination of computer-aided design, CNC routing of kits and advances in materials and construction techniques has put truly performance boats well within reach of even moderately skilled home builders. One of the first of this generation of boats was the i550 class epitomized by Tokyo Trash Baby.
Here is a nice account of her construction and some great vids of her in action.
So Yves is well along the way to having the hull assembled and ready to flip.
He is making one very interesting modification to the stock design. The original plan calls for either a bulb keel or a weighted centerboard. But Yves' is building it to have both. I'm quite curious to see how how works this out and once he is a bit further along, I plan to head over there to take a bunch more pictures. Here are a few shots of the progress on the centerboard and keel.
That last shot is of the foam positive for the mold for the keel bulb. Yves plans to have the bulb cast by a professional. When I picture vats of hot, molten lead cooking in the back yard, I think that's a wise choice.
When done, he should have a boat that is capable of racing quite well against other keelboats as well as the ability to camp-cruise along the shallow Texas bays. Sounds like the perfect boat to me. Yves, if you ever need crew, just gimme a call!
Next up in the tour is John Goodman's Goat Island Skiff. I hope to have that up in a day or two. Next on my project is installing inwales and transom and epoxying and glassing the inner seams. Unfortunately, business has kept me pretty busy since 3-D day but I'm hoping to carve out some time soon.
Cheers,
Pete
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