AMATEUR VERSUS PROFESSIONAL

Fact is amateur means lover of. Professional means doing it for money. So an amateur builds the best boat he can. An professional builds as bad a boat as he can get away with. The individual professional boatbuilder may be a skilled worker and he may like to do a good job but he has a boss that looks at the bottom line and if he continues to do good work instead of fast work he is soon out of his job.

Some production boats here in Sweden pride themselves of their high quality. In an interview the designer stated that ” The main bulkhead we laminate on booth sides to the hull. We also add an fillet before we do the glass.”

I am an amateur. Of course I laminate booth side with fillets to get a good radius and I do it not only on the main bulkhead but all bulkheads. But I also have a trick. I inject epoxy between the two laminations. I start by cutting out a groove on the bulkhead edge to get free flow right around. Even the partial bulkheads supporting the centerboard case there is more surface than comes to the mind about 200 cm by 3 cm and the strength of the Divinycell of about 10 kilos per square centimeter gives 6000 kilos supporting force there are four bulkheads in this area so about 24000 kilos the weight of the boat is less than 2000 kilos and its speed will rarely exceed 4 knots. So this is overbuilt but if in all detail you do your best you get an product that you really can love and lover thats the amateur by definition. Some may say it takes to long time, but what better can you do than something you love.

Below are some pictures of the infusion. I use NM-625 an epoxy that is very wetting and has low viscosity. The syringes are Codan 50-60 and 100 ml with catheter tip to take the tubing. I use copper tubing that can be left in place.

During epoxying an silicon rod is inserted that epoxy does not block the flow. Epoxy do not stick to silicon. The rod is extracted when the epoxi has set.