Author: admin

Mast partner

Update: here is Jari's "fork" design for the mast-partner:

The forward hole could be made a bit bigger so a 4mm acetal-rod with a small central hole for the jib-sheet will fit. There could be an M3 or M4 threaded hole added for the mast-ram, and finally some holes for a U-shaped bent wire which forms a deck-eye through which the no3 jib is sheeted.

Here's the glassfiber version I was first thinking about:

The way we mould the deck and hull in one go we don't get an overhanging foredeck which would support the mast. One solution is this kind of "mast partner" which is glued/bolted to the foredeck and provides sideways support for the mast. If the slot is made say 16 mm wide the mast will need a sleeve of metal/plastic that fits this 16 mm slot accurately. There is room for a ca 18-19 mm diameter thumbwheel(red) on the mast ram.

Here's a photo of a SAILSetc 10R (or M?) which uses this idea:

Radio install idea v3

radio
Here's another idea for the PIKANTO radio-installation. The yellow parts are 1.5 mm glassfiber boards (PCB-material) which are glued to the finbox and the mainsheet post. They would provide two or four mounting holes for M3 bolts that secure the main radio-plate (not shown) to the boat. If this is rigid enough I think no support to the sides of the hull or to the deck is required.

Jib support mould

fokkatuki
This jib-support part which goes into the bow of the boat has about three or four different purposes. First, it stiffens the forward deck to take the loads from the rig, second it provides a 6 mm i.d. tube for a dyneema-thread type no1 rig swivel, third it provides a 3mm wide slot for recessed steel pins for the no2 and no3 jibs, and fourth it holds a block for the sheeting system. Here I'm trying a home-made block made from a 24 mm diameter 3 mm wide acetal-wheel (yellow) which is designed to rotate around an M2 bolt through the sides of the shaped jib-support.

Lester Gilbert's PIKANTO-page has pictures of how the SAILSetc equivalent parts look like. With an RMG winch there is no need for the 1:2-gearing in the sheeting-system, and a block is placed at the very front of the boat (see SAILSetc part 67RMG).

SAILSetc has a downloadable drawing with the sheeting systems: http://sailsetc.com/downloads/2006/67G.pdf

Jari has cnc-milled the positive moulds for this part:

IMGP1913-1
Stock is a 200 mm length of 100 x 10 mm aluminium bar. There's a  2 mm hole in the moulds for the block-axle.

IMGP1909-1

Next follows the negative moulds.

Tank Test

tank

The PIKANTO is designed with a hull-depth very close to the maximum 60 mm permitted by the rules. Just to make sure we put our first hull in a tank today and looked at the depth. The hull weighs 600 g, so with a 2500 g fin/bulb combination and a 55 g rudder we added roughly 900 g of ballast to get just above the minimum weight of 4000 g. The measured hull-depth is very close to the design depth of ~59 mm.

No problems with the hull depth! Production will likely continue on Saturday.

Colours

IMG_0875

These are the standard colours we have for coloring gel-coat for the Pikanto right now. They are from emc-vega. Hull nr1 was a mix of blue and white, hull nr2 a mix of black and white.

The SAILSetc links to this page http://www.llewellyn-ryland.co.uk/standardrange.html which has a lot of nice colours. Anyone know where (online?) to buy those?

On an airplane-forum someone mentioned using colour pastes for 2-part epoxy-paint, is that available in cool colours somewhere?

Atom330/ITX computer for EMC2 lathe-control

I put together this small computer which will be used to control the lathe. The components for this kind of box are quite inexpensive:
D945GCLF2 motherboard including 1.6 GHz Atom330 CPU, 76 eur
Codegen MX31 case including 420W PSU, 46 eur
2Gb DDR2 memory stick, 46eur
Samsung 320Gb HDD, 44eur
Labtec keyaboard + mouse, 17eur

Total:  229 eur (no display) parts from jimms-pc and verkkokauppa.com

The motherboard has one PCI-slot for a Mesa 5I20 FPGA-card which provides 72 digital I/O pins for real-time control.

Here is the D945GCLF2 motherboard. The CPU doesn't need a fan, but there is a small fan for the PCI-controller(?).

Realtime performaceshould be OK, I was getting about 10 us of jitter for a 1 ms thread.