Let loose with a jigsaw = BIG trouble!

Interestingly while the amount of email traffic about the skiff has settled to a dull roar, a curious and anonymous note arrived on my desk this week giving a complete and thoroughly researched answer to why orange jam is called marmalade and then posing a whole host of questions which I am struggling to find answers to! I will have to think of an interesting way to answer it in due course!
But, it has prompted me to sit down for 10mins and just write the blog and firstly I need to say sorry for being slack and not getting much blogging done (although when you see how much boat we've cut up, you won't be surprised) - no excuses, but it has been busy.

So what have we been up to? Well, we decided early on that this would be a full on rebuild or nothing - that we would try to get the boat back to the best racing condition we possibly could and that means copying the kit and systems the newest boats are using. Typical of this is the latest 18's have their jib sheets lead under the fordeck, generally tidying things up and in particular so that the spinnaker doesn't get caught in the blocks on the deck during the drop. - Well chopping a great big hole in the foredeck might seem like a hairy thing to do, but, well, we had the jigsaw out anyway so what could possibly go wrong!

Well - nothing much went wrong, set the angle of the blade to 30 degrees (so that you generate a lip to stick the removed part back down on to) get your goggles on and get cutting. With the panel removed and access abound we found some more damage to fix, a piece of aluminium tube which had the tack line through it and had definitely seen better days, a novel way of sealing leaks around the back of the bow tube (using expanding foam) which was full of water and needed to be rebuilt, and that the jib sheet had been bolted to errr, well not much really...

So now, as you can see from the photo, there is a whopping great hole and an equally long carbon tube running from mast to bow sprit tube, which before a lot of you have read this, will be bonded in place and be ready to have the jib sheets running inside it, along with the tack line for the kite and a rare piece of nautical cordage called a Jib Cunningham... Which an ozzie mate says he adjusts 'once a season - maybe less'...

So the bottom line is, sorry for the lack of writing, but I've been chopping up carbon fibre as fast as I can so that I have something to write about... which is of course a bit of a paradox and brings me neatly to a question posed this week by my anonymous note writer - 'Why the huge temperature disparity between Mummy and Daddy bear's porridge when they were clearly poured at the same time?' A brilliant question when one considers that Mummy bears bowl could well have been smaller, which would therefore have a smaller surface area and therefore should actually be hotter, not colder! We may well have to investigate the materials the bowls were made of to get to the bottom of this one!!

Just another half an hour...

It's a state of mind. Sanding. The buzz of the orbital starts off as just some intrusive noise, but after a day or so becomes an exact pitch you can hum for days afterwards, giving a precise and exact indication of the amount of pressure you are applying to the work. The swirls left by the sanding disc start off as random C shaped scratches and end up as a roadmap, a handwriting sample, a graphic equaliser showing the sharpness of the grit left on the disc. You get in tune with the job - it comes from hours of standing, sanding, thinking of little more than how the boat will look when you're finished, how smooth the surface is, how the paint tastes, why is orange jam called marmalade, where does all the dust go, will Ipswich ever win a game of football again, what colour shall we paint it.

A great boat builder once gave me a truly top tip about sanding. Sanding is boring but has to be done - the trick is to sand until you are really bored - until you can't think of anything to distract you any more and are just totally at your wits end with it - then do another half an hour....