MONTAUK'S CHARTER SAILING CATAMARANS
Documenting the build of Mon Tiki by Captain David Ryan and crew, right here on the East End in Bridgehampton and Montauk!
If you compare this photo to yesterday’s photo, you’ll see the sawhorses have been removed from under the starboard hull backbone, and there are temporary legs on every frame. We used a laser to get our fore/aft and port/starboard alignment and then fixed the temporary legs to blocks screwed into the shop floor. On the…
This photo shows the starboard hull backbone, lined up on a zero mark (the blue tape), and blocked in place along a reference wire stretched along the floor. The lower bulkheads have been “welded” in place using a high-strength filleting compound of epoxy, glass micro-spheres, and colloidal silica (the white substance at the intersection of…
I have been reading about scarfing plywood for as long as I’ve been building boats, but I’ve never done it. The idea of hand-cutting a square 12:1 edge along a sheet of plywood just seemed impossibly impossible. But today I had no choice. The lay-ups for the rudders for the Tiki 38 are too long…
We met Joe down at the boat-shop today to catch some epoxy work while it was still green and easy to take down with a surform. Catching it while it’s still soft is way way better than waiting till it’s hard enough to grind, because when epoxy is hard enough to grind/sand, it’s really hard!…
I had previously described building this boat as having two distinct steps; the second being the assembly of its parts, and the first being the fabrication of the parts. (Or as Dave put it to his son, “You know how you like to build with Legos? Daddy likes to build with Legos too, but he…
We are building a James Wharram designed Tiki 38, with additional engineering to meet US Coast Guard inspected passenger vessel specifications by John Marples of Searunner designs. What that means is that right now we have a barn filled with just over 100 sheets of BS 1088 marine plywood, 500 board feet of vertical grain…
Some moments of drama and doubt today. When the liftgate went up on the delivery truck, the first thing I noticed is that the protective creates for our precious plywood were all but destroyed. My first thought was “Oh no. How long is it going to take to get a replacement shipment?” But fate was…
We are building Mon Tiki to US Coast Guard Inspected Passenger Vessel specs, and that meant we had to beef up the scantlings, mostly by increasing the per-side stringer count (strakes that run fore and aft on the inside of the hull) from 5 per side to 7 per side, and increase the demension of…