Thursday, February 15, 2007

We Think We Can, We think We Can...We Know We Can

Yesterday Alan's Mom and Dad came over from Chapel Hill to drop off some goodies for the boat and general race preparation. The list includes:

Dry bags
Spray top
A great assortment of sailing hardware from Duckworks
Head lamps
A PFD knife
General saftey items
Wa'apa seat Mk. II, with action retracting support bars
A deck bag
& 4 cockpit coamings from Hurricane Kayaks

Alan and I headed back to school to work on some homework (Orbital Mechanics) and to pick up the heat gun and trusty jigsaw. After we were both finished with the homework we returned to the storage unit for some cockpit prepping.

When we cut out the experimental cockpit holes we made them too big, so we needed to glue in some plywood sections so that the combings will have a strong lip to rest on. But before work began on the plywood additions we started playing with the combings and the heat gun. Just like Bittu, from Great Outdoor Provision Co., said we were able to heat the combings with the heat guns, let it cool for several seconds and then it held it's shape.

Alan worked on molding the combing to the curvature of the deck while I cut out the plywood inserts. After it was all said and done we were very happy with the results, and it was late (or early), so we came back to campus to catch a few precious z's.

I almost for got to mention that earlier in the day we returned to Joseph Huberman's house to put the finishing touches on each sail. We added two 30" vertical baton sleeves on the leach of each sail. We also got to talking about Mr. Huberman's very large and very cool boat, Prestissimo, which he built a couple years back. He has been great help for our sail making adventure.




As you might have noticed there is a dearth of pictures for this post, but I promise you will see some lovely pictures of our work in the next 24hrs. In the mean time here is a picture of one member of Team RAF which made the school newspaper.