Before the port main hull half could receive its beam bulkheads, I had to finish the carbon lower folding strut anchor assemblies—post-curing, building the base plates, and laminating the final build-up. A single ‘how did I miss that’ mistake forced me to tear one assembly apart and start again, but the end result is a brutally strong, meticulously bonded folding-system foundation.
Port side folding system setup and placing beam bulkheads
When working on the starboard half I made all the carbon lower folding strut anchors, but not the complete anchor assemblies for the port side. So before mounting these carbon anchors, I first had to finish some unfinished business: post-curing the anchors (this time not in the kitchen oven) and making the complete anchor assemblies.
It may look like I always have things under control, but that’s mostly an illusion. Silly mistakes do happen. After freeing the two carbon anchor assemblies from their vacuum bag and preparing to mount them in the hull, I discovered the base plate was shorter than the anchors… F**### (censored). In a moment of madness I had mounted the base plate the wrong way around. By itself that wouldn’t have been fatal, except that all the UD fibres were now running in the wrong direction. Three days of beautiful laminate work — gone.
There is a lot of laminating work to do around the beam bulkheads, with up to 20 layers of UD fabric in some areas. The structure looks truly solid and bulletproof. Because the laminate build-up and the bond into the surrounding hull are critical here, I try to be even more meticulous than usual.
This photo gallery (78 images) shows the full sequence: post-curing the carbon anchors, infusing and shaping the base plates, vacuum-bagging the build-up around the assemblies, the painful UD-orientation mistake and rebuild, mounting both lower folding-strut anchor assemblies in the hull, and finally lifting, aligning, and placing the beam bulkheads before the heavy UD reinforcement work begins.
