G'day,
Thanks for the feedback. ;-) Apologies to anyone who was
offended. Pretty much inevitable once we start talking politics.
I meant, and should have said 'per capita pollution', but my main
point was the relative levels of wealth and education.
Back to boats.
QC was always going to be the biggest problem to overcome. I would
appreciate any advice on what more we can do, and on any other
potential problems that are not covered below.
My contact in China is a german merchant navy captain who has been
building boats there for 20 years. His approach to QC is to carry a
chainsaw and anything which is not up to scratch gets chopped up.
Apparently it concentrates the worker's minds extremely well!
We have pretty much decided to vacuum bag the components and use foam,
glass and epoxy for the hulls and beams, with carbon masts. More
costs, higher chance of a stuff up, but less chance of sub standard
work.
Each boat will be weighed and balanced to find the centre of
gravityfore and aft and sideways. This should eliminate excessive or
insufficient material.
Harryproas are particularly well suited to static tests of all
components. That is, place a component on a couple of saw horses and
apply large weights to the extremities and measure deflections. The
loads used in these tests will be between the max designed load and
the normal working load. Tests will be documented and photographed
and included with each boat's paperwork, as will instructions on how
to repeat the tests, so the distributor and/or the owner can do them
as well.
Resin coupons and hull cutouts will be included with each boat.
Materials, environment and vacuum details recorded for each laminating
step, and .
This is already standard practice on our larger masts. Takes a while
for the workforce to get into the swing of it, but once they are,
quality becomes consistently good.
The beams and decks are built in the same mould so alignment is not a
problem. The joins are external and simple. The rig is unstayed, so
as long as the carbon mast and boom bench test within limits, there
should be no problems. Sails will be mass produced once we know what
works, so should be accurate.
The rudder blades are joined along the sides, not the front and back.
This is more work, but gives a much more reliable join and more
accurate leading and trailing edges.
The boats will be painted post mould, so a visual check of the
laminate will show any vac bag problems.
Substitution is a worry. Fortunately, there is not much you can do to
epoxy, glass and carbon to affect the long term mechanical properties
relevant to a beach proa that will not show up in the cure rate and
bench tests.
Any UV problems will show in the paint. I have been told that
imported Awlgrip is the paint of choice. Expensive, but far easier
to apply than the local product, so it is money well spent. There is
only 10 sqm/110 sq' of surface to be painted, so the actual cost of
the paint per boat is not a huge component.
A 100% money back guarantee if the boats are not up to spec at the
distributor level is probably going to be in place, but there are
difficulties involved in making this bulletproof.
Comments appreciated.
regards,
Rob
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