MALE MOLD FOR WINDOW FRAMES

The male mold for the window frames is now done. The female product will hold a 2×3 centimeter EPDM-cell-foam gasket. The windows will be made of tempered glass. That way I get a clear view. Glass transmit heat better than plastic. Therefore I will get a lot of condensation on the windows during wintertime. Some person may at first think that is bad. But humidity will be one of the biggest problems during the cold part of the year. If it gets to the windows I can get rid of it thus making a dryer boat. Dry cold is not really a problem.

Some may think polycarbonate is a good window material because of its high impact strength. It will however crack if exposed to static pressure. Also its very sensitive to solvents. for example just a touch aceton and it will crumble. Try it and you be amazed. In a few seconds its strengths is gone.

One problem with tempered glass is that nickel sulfied cases spantanius fracture in tempered glass. However this is greatly reduced by heat soak test. Statistically there will be about one chance in a millon of it to ockour. If so thanks to the EPDM gaskets I can change a window in a few nimutes. They have a sight thruogh diameter of 22 cm.

To speed up production the mold is for two frames at the time saves on vacum bagging.

A picture below.

To be continued…

Regards Yrvind

POSITIONING THE FORWARD BULKHEADS

There is four partial bulkheads in the saloon. They constitute the fore and aft part of stowage space. There I will store food batteries and other things that do not like water. Above this storage is the main hatch therefore it is essential that the lid is waterproof. To achieve that there is a gasket in the lid but it is equally important that the top edges of the bulkhead that will take the lid is as parallel. My method is to use a piece of plane particle board  (particle board do not warp) and to screw on L-profiles in the corners and clamp it. First I got the aft bulkhead in place then making my arms small I was able with the help of wedges and other tricks to get the forward bulkhead tight to the particle board. Then I fixed it with NM-epoxy. The obtained result was very satisfying. Below is two pictures.

Below the template in action.

To be continued…

Regards Yrvind.

AFTER THE MOCK-UP THE REAL BOAT.

It has taken me a long and enjoyable time to do the mock up of the complete boat in 12 mm plywood just as I like it. The reason I did the whole boat is that everything interferes with everything else. Working on the centerboard case interferes with the hatches and the mast and so on. Now the mock-up is unscrewed and stored for reference. The first part is the four partial bulkheads in the saloon two on each side of the centerboard case. They will be part of the storage tanks. The lids will act as tables.

Here they are ready to be laminated. The plywood strip is to take the cell foam gasket.

To be continued…

Regards Yrvind.

ON LIFE AND LENGTH

To spend 600 days, or maybe even two years, alone on a ten feet boat, far from land trying to set a record, is a foolish thing to do, but foolish things can bring big rewards.

A friend told me that in the US there is one man that gets paid the equivalent of one billion Swedish kronor each year for golfing. My pension is 5000 Swedish kroner.

A billion kroner, just one years earning of that top sportsman would keep me with food and board for seventeen thousands (17000) years. That’s an incentive.

Henry Ford, early in his career, built a car that went so fast that he did not dare to ride it. With another man at the wheel it did set a world speed record.

That fame enabled him to set up a factory to build millions of T-fords for ordinary people. That’s an incentive.

So when this idea of aroundinten came up, like Ford, I saw a chance to get the means to give ordinary people a chance to safely sail the world’s oceans in a small, ecological and functional boat.

But readers beware, Fords world record car was not a good car for ordinary people and this present boat, Yrvind Ten is not a good boat for ordinary people. My next boat, a boat with similar displacement, but longer and narrower will go faster with less sail area and that is better engineering and that boat will be a good boat for people that like to have an alternative to the wilderness on land. There is many times as much wilderness out there on the deep water.

I hope that when people read about me sailing my little functional boat on the sympathetic, eternal, endless, deep, and wet sea, non-stop, for so many days’, bright persons, even governments, may realize that the sea is not a war zone and that we better not waste our non-renewable resources’ on big boats.

When I was a child our earth had two billion inhabitants. Now we are more than seven and heading for ten. Oil, phosphor and other resources are getting exhausted.

Many grown ups say that economical growth is more important than freedom and that they don’t care if we run out of oil and phosphor. They say we will always find something else, something that is even better. But oil is not produced; it is a finite resource that is extruded. There are no economical alternatives because oil is concentrated energy and to concentrate energy is terribly expensive. Alternatives to phosphor cannot be bought for money. Phosphor is a chemical element and vegetables cannot grow without it. That is proven by Liebigs law of the minimum. It states that growth is controlled not by the total amount of resources available, but by the scarcest resource.

Grown ups say, doomsayers have been around long before Malthus and they have always been proved wrong.

I beg to differ; we have always paid an unreasonable price for economical growth. The invention of agriculture was mankind’s biggest disaster. Before agriculture we lived the sort of carefree life the kind Jesus said his father had meant us to live, like the birds in the sky and the lilies on the fields. With agriculture that changed, instead came bondage and hierarchies, abundance and scarcity, and of course, many more people.

During the industrial revolution it got even worse with child labor in the mines and grown ups stupefying themselves with alcohol.

During the twentieth century, to pack even more people on the earth they started to feed us, and even our cows with industrialized food, poisoned with, high fructose corn syrup, trans fats, artificial colorings, sodium nitrate, phthalates, antibiotics and much more.

Agriculture, industrialization and factory food, each of those inventions multiplied the population. It’s a one-way road. Today’s billions of people cannot go back to foraging because foragers need wide open spaces, not cities. Besides that, today’s people do not have the skills and stamina of Stone Age man.

The genes of todays people is from the same gene pool as Stone Age people, but from that gene pool has been selected the genes that breed todays zombies, the kind of people that can stand working in the inhuman conditions found in factories and offices. Luckily not all freedom loving people have been exterminated and some even revolt.

Nature’s idea of sex is not pleasure; it is to keep a gene pool that can produce individuals, not clones, because individuals can adapt to different environments. If we were bred like clones, mankind would not be resilient to changes.

I do not agree. I do not like to be fenced in in an office or factory. For me there exists one last habitat that has not been changed by the grown ups desire for economical growth. That’s the sea, the sympathetic, eternal, endless, deep, and wet sea. I like to spend my time out there.

Not only will my planned voyage give me an opportunity to try out new technical solutions like my cherished ideas about rigging, rudders, swim platform, side hatches and many more things. It will also help me to explore new mental states, the higher spheres. Physiologically and mentally there is not as much as we like to think that makes us different from rats and other mammals. Consider this, nearly all drugs are tested on rats before we eat them ourselves. Not only drugs for bodily ailments but also drugs for mental diseases. The fact is we do not consist of body and mind. We are only body; otherwise drugs and other physiological interferences would not have mental effects.

Animals, except in captivity, do not get bored. We humans get bored because we live in captivity. We believe that we are free but thousands of things tie us down. Don’t believe me; just try to leave right now for the seemingly simple thing of a week of walkabout.

We try to escape our boredom by consumption and entertainments, by food and sex, and by dopamine releasing drugs like, tea, coffee, alcohol and worse. But our body is not so easily fooled. If we wear glasses that make us see the world upside down, the brain soon adapts and gets it right. When we take them of we will again, for a while, see the world upside down.

If we eat painkillers, soon our bodies will adapt and make us more sensitive to pain.

The more dopamine releasing drugs we consume, the smaller our dopamine receptors become and we get dependent on the drug, even if the drug is not more harmful than coffee and tea. Even animals quite different from us, crayfish for example, get hooked on our kind of drugs. Life’s ancient building blocks are the same in all animals.

Carefully calibrated pain and pleasure sensors are our survival guides. Do not mess with nature. Millions of years of trail and error have optimized our organism for survival.

Seeking comfort, borrowing money, taking drugs and having big boats, feels good in the short term, but is a disaster in the long run. Seeking comfort is in our genes because they were created at a different time when comfort had survival value. Some drugs consist of very simple molecules, alcohol for example. If drugs had any survival value animals, always under survival pressure, would long time ago have started to produce them. Take alcohol for example some people say it is good for health. I disagree. If it had any over all value our bodies would have started to produce alcohol even before the much more complicated hormones. We have pain receptors, not to give us hell, but to help us to survive. Our bodies release pleasure hormones when we act survival wise to guide us on the good path.

At sea I will be free from the daily overstimulation I get exposed to here on land. Some people argue that adventurers seek stimulation and adrenalin kicks. They think that is what makes me tick during my stormy voyages. They are wrong. Sailing in a well conceived, small, strong, and self-tending boat is for me not an adventure, its routine; building the boat is adventure. After giving my boat direction she will take good care of me even when she is fighting the seas most terrible fury. Don’t misunderstand me, the voyage will be an endeavor, even a struggle at times, but when you fight to the limit of your capacity you are happy without stimulants. You fall asleep without sleeping pills, because you are tired. You wake up like a dog, wide-awake without coffee because you are eager. You do not have to spice your food. You eat it plain with delight because you are hungry and your body needs nourishments and ordinary tap water tastes wonderful because you are thirsty.

Most people misunderstand life. Comfort does not make anyone happy; on the contrary, comfort is highly dangerous. Comfort makes you lazy, fat and bored. It is only by using energy that one is creating energy and it is an excess of energy that makes you happy and healthy. Happiness cannot be bought for money.

I was born on the windward side of a small island in the North Sea in a house 50 meters from the sea. Water is my element. The sea is my home, the stars my friends, out there and only out there do I feel completely safe. On land I am like a fish in the woods.

It is not easy to set a world record when one is 75 years old. To give myself the best chances I will do as yacht designers have done since measurement rules came into use. I will take advantage of the rule. Now at first it seams that the aroundinten rule is so extremely simple, so very well defined that there cant possible be any loophole.

One. -The boat has to be shorter then ten feet.

Two. –The boat has to circumnavigate.

That’s all there is to it.

However, first I like to mention that the custom to measure a boats size by length is most unfortunate and misleading. There are slim boats and there are fat boats. Obviously, for the same length a fat boat is bigger than a slim boat. An eight-year-old child understands that. A corollary is that a ten feet boat designed for a two-year non-stop circumnavigation just have to be fat, and fat boats are bad boats. Still this challenge like the challenge of becoming a golf world champion is an interesting task and it has taken me to a road seldom visited. On this lonesome road my eyes has been opened for new solutions and the boat has taken on a life of its own. I now feel more like I am guiding a young beautiful little she to grove than designing a boat.

Back to the rule! Life is not always as simple as it seams. For example there exist many different kinds horsepower’s and tons. Before 1960 there were also many different kinds of feet’s, but today we have an international agreement that equals a foot to 0.3048 meters and we can forget the plethora of obsolete feet’s that have been in use in different countries throughout history. And the meter, it is now defined as the distance light travels in a 299,792,458 fraction of a second.

Euclid has postulated, “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line”. Regarding my circumnavigation the question is where on the boat, according to relevant authorities, can I situate these two points. One would like to think that the outermost points would be the logical candidate for measuring length overall. The truth is, marina operators favor them. Most other authorities, like the US coast guard, the European Recreational Directive’s harmonized rules, the International Towing Tank Conference, the Nordic Boat Standard and other recognized bodies according to common practice, exclude spars, bowsprits, and rudders, bolted on swim platforms, pulpits, and other fittings from the measured length.

A boat can also be measured by, its length on the waterline, its length between its perpendiculars and for racing yachts the very important rated length that is considering the fullness of the bow and stern in a more or less complex way.

So evidently not even length is as simple as it first seams. This has designers of racing yacht in all times taken advantage of. One classical example is E. H. Bentalls Jullinar. The rule at the time measured length from stem to sternpost, the aft end of the boat. Bentall placed the sternpost well forward of the aft waterline thereby he got, according to the rating rule, a much shorter boat and a better measurement and handicap and thereby gained many a races. The history of yacht racing is full of such examples. Figures of two of the more famous ones are shown below.

Today, if a yacht designer is not trying to find the rules sweet spot he is not doing his job and obviously any designs of his if built will not win. Even as recent as during the latest America Cup Races 2013 the lawyers were fighting to define length. The first of those races was sailed in 1851.

By adding a bolted on non-measured swim platform that has some buoyancy I have to my shame become a rule cheater, but if by being a rule cheater I will also increase my chances, so it may be. My excuse is the idea of measuring a boats size by its length is foolish and if my rule cheating can help to change that custom I be happy. I prefer to see an aroundinoneton race (metric) a race based on volume, not length.

As to the route, the east about way at first seems to be the most difficult one. But the never changing truth is, land and its bureaucrats they are small boats sailors worst enemy, not the sympathetic, eternal, endless, deep, and wet sea.

My boat has taken on a life of its own and I have started to love her and I am really looking forward to spending long time at sea with her.

Regards Yrvind

ANSVERING CRITICS

To those that do not agree on my bolted on rudder and swim platform arrangement I like to say the following.

Yeas it is a complication. But KISS is not everything. Without complications we would still be driving around in T-Fords and using crank starts. Nature is complicated; every little cell is more complicated than the most complicated sailboat we can imagine. Nature proofs that complications do work. The Wright brothers did invent the airplane in their bicycle shop. The airplane is more complicated than the bicycle. Still the airplane can be a useful thing.

But also with every complication you add there sure will be some detail or interference that mess everything up; something you did not think about. Reality is to complicated for an invention to work at first try. Do not give up. Fix it and get an improved product. To succeed you must give yourself plenty of time to test your invention in all kinds of different conditions. And if you cannot find a good solution to the problem kill your darling like writers do all the time.

Yrvind Ten is an experimental boat and there will be many things that at first will not work. If I cannot fix it even after hard thinking I kill it and try something else.

My intention is first to try her here in the Baltic. If that works out I intend to make a voyage from Norway to Grimsey, an small island just north of Iceland. It has been inhabited since Viking times. It is a cold and miserable place even in summer.

Of course the bolted on swim platform is a complication. But at present it looks that its good points outweigh its bad ones.

To prevent the aft extension to force the bow up I will give the twin rudders quite a bit of displacement – no law against that. I will give them a 0020 NACA section, a cord of 0.4 meter and a depth of 0.9 meter. That gives about 40 liters of added displacement far aft and should more than compensate for the weight of the platform and I think even help to reduce pitching.

As for having rudders far back. Its simple mathematics the further back they are the more leverage you get and the more  yaw damping. Think about them in this way. The peripheral speed of the rudders increases with the gyradius and the hardness of water increase with the square of the rudders speed and the rudder force increase also with gyradius.

As for self-steerers if you can avoid them its good. I made my first ocean passage 1969 and my last one 2011. They were made without self-steering as well as the many ocean passages I made between them. I have succesfully crossed oceans in six very differnt boats without self-steerers. Self-steerers are cumbersome fragile things. My friend Matt Layden does not use them either. When he single-handed did win his first entry in The Water Tribe Race he came to the races destination one day before the second finisher. That indicates that sailing with out self-steeres dont have to be sloow.

Do not misundrstand me. I am in favour of simple things but I also like progress.

Regards Yrvind

THE RATCHET WHEEL

Building the winches for the lines that control the tiller I needed a ratchet wheels. First I made a prototype in plywood. Then Miki made a one on the computer.

Lena and Mikael boating people here in of Svetsmekano i Västervik helped me to cut out one to test on their fantastic abrasive water jet of 10 mm stainless steel. That was no problem they can cut out any figure in up to 200 mm stainless steel and most other materials as well to a tenth of a millimeter.

The photo below shows lena with the machine.

Below is the product and the plywood prototype.

Now when I got the pieces I will continue trying to get a good solution.

To bee continued…

Regards Yrvind.

A NEW INSIDE/OUTSIDE STEERING SYSTEM

Most ropes have two ends. A good thing for the man that wants to steer from inside and also from the outside. Many a time a I have woken up when the boat got of course. May bee the wind had increased or something else was the matter. Climbing out of the worm bunk and slightly adjusting the rudder was all there was to it. When the weather is squally and demands many adjustments it is tiring. Yrvind Ten will have an inside and an outside steering position. As it takes some time to find the right setting it is a good thing if the two steering adjustments don’t affect each other.

One such system is to have self  tailing bottom acted winches under the aft deck, the axis being sealed by stuffing boxes to prevent water from entering the sleeping room. As I have two rudders and no line can take compression I need four winches. (The winches are under construction). This will handle the inside steering. Luckily a line has two ends. From the winch the line leeds to the tiller handle where you get a lot of leverage. From there it continues to a point close to above the rudder axis where the leverage is minimum. When the line is tensioned the force is equal all along the the line but the moment depends on the leverage so if pulling on the rope near the rudder axis the tiller will move. The pictures below will hopefully help to illuminate the idea.

Above. The mock up. One of the rudder heads in the foreground. The four winches are in the background.

The lines for starboard and port swing comes out of a fairleed and goes to a small bollard. The bollard will reduce the force  – which can be great when surfing down a breaker –  by 90% and direct the line to a cam cleat.

Steering with lines from the swimming platform or from the main hatch or from the mast topp. The fairleed is close to the rudder axis. The lever is small and the rudder handle is swinging.

Above, the four winches. My bunk is just below.

To be continued…

Regards Yrvind.

Uppdate 2014

Good New Year.

Miki from Wienna is here again to help with computer modelling and wideo.

I have had an eye operation. I was nearly blind on the left eye. For a man that has ten thousand books that was bad news.

It was the macula. A nice doctor drained the eye did her work and filled the eye with air. After a while water started to leak in. I saw the world like through a diving mask half filled with water. later only a bubble was left. Then the bubble was gone. Then I could look up. I had been laying on my stomach for two weeks.

However I had been thinking on my boat. I had decided that I needed a new rudder system.

Below the old one.

Here is the new system.

It gives me more place on the swimming platform. I can also stand there when sculling. The rudders foreward en will be under the platform preventing them from ventilating when the boat is travelling fast, that is surfing down a breaker.

There will also be a lot of fine weather. For those days there will be a side hatch close to the water on each side. See above.

Above chart table and book support.

Above chart table from side. It can be angled will slide and by changing the fulcrum can move up and down. Also when on other tack it can be angled from the other side. I will spend a lot of time reading my 100 kilo books during the planned 600 days voyage.

To be continued…

Regards Yrvind

ÄNTLIGEN – AT LAST – THE RUSSIAN BOOK IN PRINT

Grigory visited me last summer. He came sailing in his little boat across the Baltic.

After looking at my boat he volentered to publish my book in russian.

Today I recived a registred mail from Moscow.

Inside was the book.

The back cover shows 20 feet Bris, the boat I built in my late mothers basements route 1972 – 1976.The price is 5€ or 220 rubles if I got it right. For copies please contact Grigory.parusa@narod.ru

http://parusanarod.ru/bib/books/yrvind/index.htm

BACK AT WORK

I have been away given talks and it has gone well. In Sandviken I got help from small boat builder Martin Stenberg. He is building a chinerunner of his own design close to Enigma. In Germany Henning Saal is building an other Enigma. Henning is helping me to produce electricity. He is converting an electric bicycle engine to a muscle driven generator. Hopefully I can show more about it after he has done further trails. I am grateful for the generous help giving to me by the small boat community.

I have also been talking in Norrköping, the site of The Swedish Transport Agency. Nice and friendly people but some of the laws they try to enforce are ridicules. One such is the EU:s RCD the recreational craft directive. The RCD forbids Small Ocean going boats. When I exhibited my boat in Stockholm I got a note stating that I was forbidden to sell it or use it. I asked them what they were going to do about that. If you sell it we will destroy the boat, they said.
When I lived on the west coast a farmer having a peaceful breakfast was disturbed by shots being fired. Looking out he saw his cows lying dead on the field. His crime. He had not put a plastic earmark on his cattle. This is contemporary Sweden.
But hidden beyond the bureaucratic rules there is always a small cheap functional solution to problems. Before our good bureaucrats act,  I will be beyond the horizon.

Photo abouve me and my boat with paper from the Swedish transport Agency forbidding to use it or sell it.

A child understands that a small boat is more seaworthy than a big one. It is a fact that a small boat designed and built according to the right thinking is safer than a bigger one. Big boats create dangerous forces. Complicated technology is needed to control such forces. The more complicated a boat is the more vulnerable it is, especially in a marine environment. Only in a small, simple, functional, boat does one have absolute control when the sea brings down its ruthless fury.

Photo above small creatures are stronger than big ones an ant can lift more than ten times its own wheight

Photo abouve: Small things are strong: Mary Edson Taylor 1901 at 63 years of age this coragues schoolteacher went down the Niagara falls and survived. Her craft was small and strong, now more than a 100 years later with modern composites we can make even stronger small craft.
Back at work I continue with my mock-ups one after the other, each one an improvement on the previous. It is a creative process similar to writing and when you write you always make a draft and rewrite. Not so in boatbuilding. Why?  Well, we got the Recreational Craft Directive with its bureaucratic rules that puts the builder in a corner where he do not have much alternatives.

Photo abouve part of the saloon.


Photo abouve click once or twice to enlarge. One of the many discarded hatches.

To be continued…

Regards Yrvind