KVARK – the homebuilt microcruiser | Kvark is a homemade plywood boat to cross the Atlantic in 2018-2019

Railings and oak

Posted on July 17, 2016 by Uku

Hello!

Here we go, the push to sea has started. We have now a new railing in the fore of the boat. This is to prevent people from falling overboard and for fixing portside and starboard “lifelines”, the ropes you can harness to. We have the epoxy primer and antifoul for painting the boat below waterline. We finally have custom sails! With the possibility of reefing the mainsail! We never had a reefable mainsail before. That is exciting. We even have a liferaft and a ton of other equopment to get us certified and all legal. Right now, Kvark does not exist de jure, a problem for the state, obviously. Unfortunately we have to get Kvark registered as a category C sailboat. Categories B and A will cost 5k EUR at least, plus a ton of time.

Next up will be painting, fixing rigging the gear to the boat, transporting and … sea! We discovered some bare oak under the keel when washing off freshwater gunk from the hull. That is a bit of a concern. But as Joosep put it: the keel is meant to get it rough. So we are simply going to paint over it, fingers crossed. Here are pictures:

: It was time to put my welder back in action. It had a toasted winding. Oh, and the welder now has a soft-start circuit. No more blown fuses due to inductive overloads.

: So I replaced the toasted winding with a better than ever new winding.

: That is almost how the railing started out: a windscreen holder for a powerboat. Here, some pieces have been removed.

: A bit of work and voila, handrails are on the way.

: A trick learned from “weldingtipsandtricks” YouTube chanel. AISI316L is very prone to warping when welded. A lot of the warp can be avoided if one uses a massive metal element to draw away welding heat. In this case it is a slab of steel.

: Another trick I learned from watching YouTube videos. Joining steel pipe is a lot easier with a little hidden sleeve. It auto-aligns the pipe and prevents burning holes into the joint when welding.

: Nice little handles for attaching rope to.

: New handrail installed with AISI316L bolts and of course bad-ass marine Sikaflex adhesive.

: I put up the mast with help from my brother to check whether the handrail would interfere with one of the stays. It did not!

: Ever so often you get lucky and drill into a screw. Fortunately I was able to excavate this one and remove it with very little damage. Maybe it’d be wise to metal-detect an area before starting to drill it? There are hundreds of screws in the boat.

: Installing the fore-handrail was a bit of a pain due to the tight opening through which I had to tighten bolts.

: The lovely oak mast-rotator handle. I hope to deploy it this season 🙂

: A mockup of the “hold on” mini-handrail, whcih connects the fore and aft handrails via rope.

: A panorama view of the rope-handrail setup.

: Little shells, 1 mm size at most. But definitely shells. All from three months on an inline lake.

: A bit of scrubbing got rid of the gunk.

: Bare oak at the keel. This is a bit of a problem that we have decided to neglect by simply painting over it with a few layers of epoxy paint. More maintenance will come later, in the winter.

: Some paint fracture due to wood expanding underneath.

: The spot where the rock hit.

: We have sails! Finally we have custom sails for Kvark. This will be exciting indeed.

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A shift

Posted on July 2, 2016 by Uku

Hello!

What a wonderful summer it is outside. We just celebrated the summer solstice and nature is in a youthful bloom. It’d be perfect for a day two on the sea, sailing!

To get to the sea, we need to start ticking thigs off our to-do list. School is done, so there is potential for vacant weekends or weekdays.

We started off by transporting the boat back to where it was created: the garage. It was a bit sad seeing Kvark back home, since it was such an effort getting it out of home. Nevertheless, infrastructure is much better at the garage, electricity, large hardware stores, tools and whatnot.

So, we have decided:
1) To antifoul. That is simply to paint everything below the waterline with a paint uncomfortable to marine-life. This requies subtasks:
1.1) Wash and scrub the waterline of dirt
1.2) Sand
1.3) Paint with epoxy primer
1.4) Paint with antifoul

2) We have decided to add railings to the fore deck since it is uncomfortable to maneuver on deck otherwise. Especially for guests. We have the steel. The subtasks are:
2.1) Fix welder (one of two windings is toast)
2.2) Build frames
2.3) Fix frames

3) Add ventilation to cabin hatch. Ventilation is really poor at the moment, nonexistent to be precise. So we are going to add a simple grill to the cabin hatch. This way we avoid cutting a hole into the hull. No significant subtasking here.

4) Attend to the sails. The main problem here is that we still have not have Kvark on water with proper, custom made sails. Thus we have yet to discover optimal performance metrics. We are trying to our best to get this solved.

5) Touch up the varnish here and there. Subtasks:
5.1) Sand
5.2) Varnish

And.. here is some eye candy:

: Kvark and the crane equipped lorry. We managed the loading just before hail and thunder.

: And we arrived at the garage just after the hail and thunder finished. What luck! And the boat was still on the lorry.

: We had to climb one steep hill. You can see that the straps have held Kvark back, they are tilted diagonally to the right. Good straps.

: There is Kvark, back home again!

: On close inspection, I discovered a interesting wear line on one of the rudder pins. The three pins are not in perfect alignment. Here we see that the pin-receiving hole would want to go more towars the boat. I think the easiest fix is to enalrge the receiving hole. Also, the receiving hole had no wear on it at all. This means that the pin is of a different hardness. This can perhaps be attributed to welding temper: the pin is TIG welded to the sheet metal seen on the picture, right at the junction of the sheet and pin. This place is softer due to weld heat and would thus yield to the same but untreated steel. Or should the weld be harder than the base metal? I don’t know. Just my thoughts.

: The fore deck hatch is showing signs of deterioration. This is probably due to the same effect that cracked our polycarbonate windows: the polymerization reaction causes expansion of the silicone. Thus, the hatch should not have been tightened as hard as it was.

So, next post will hopefully be soon and document our progress towards the ultimate goal: the sea.

Posted in Building blog | Tagged antifoul | Leave a comment

The list of things still to do

Posted on May 21, 2016 by Uku

Hello, sailors!

Sorry for the slack in post-production. I intended to write a small article every month starting from January, but I failed. Graduation deadlines are pressing hard and I’ve had no time to write anything meaningful. It does take time.

I visited Kvark by the lake on the 3rd of May. And I was really glad to see it, smell it and touch it. It has definitely survived the winter. I had a peek under the cover. The varnish (LeTonkinois) is peeling off slightly from here-and-there. So that will have to be refurbished.

I plan on starting work on Kvark as soon as I get my university stuff done. That is around 2-3rd of June. I have decided to simply antifoul the hull, attach a railing, check and refit any critical rigging assets and then call it OK for launch. I’ll have to take the word of smarter people that barnacles do not grow in the dark (they need flowing water) and thus I shall not plug up the water-ballast tanks. We are not going into tropic waters this season and the shipworm teredo navalis is not an issue in the near Baltic due to low salinity and cold winters. Lets have the pictures: