Amas - Planking Vacation
It’s summer, at least the calendar says so. Instead it’s kind of a rainy season. We often say that we feel like back in Ireland, where we spent few years of our lives and where we met each other. At that time still as bikers. Kerstin on her Honda CBR600F and me on my Kawasaki NINJA 600. We love those memories.
I must say, I do not mind a rainy summer for the first time in my life. Why? We have a plan B. We build our trimaran JoL. We took our summer vacation from work, which has to be planned months ahead and it's always just a guess, what weather we catch…
We are now full time home builders. It’s absolutely perfect. Outside it's raining and my wife Kerstin and me together building 3 halves of Ama. I must say, it goes pretty fast. We are a well synchronized team. Kerstin learns very fast, so after few instructions she delivers perfectly mixed epoxy and organizes and marks the planks. She is definitely more conceptual than me. Sometimes I am a mess. She brought fresh air into the workshop for sure.
Because work is progressing pretty well, I slowly have to start to think about the next step. There are a few aspects to consider. Time of the year is the first aspect. As I already mentioned, our workshop is only partially heated. Secondly, I have to take into consideration where we want to be roughly in time of next early spring. We agreed that the rough plan is to start to build the scaffold for the main hull latest in March 2026. So, when the sun heats up our workshop enough, we would be ready to start building the main hull instantly. I will definitely get back to this topic more often in the coming posts.
We enjoy working with the West System epoxy. The pumps are super precise. Yes, I still have a micro scale next to me to check from time to time the ratio and amount of epoxy. Kerstin made a spreadsheet table and we have it on the wall, so it's easy to check it. The table displays the number of pump strokes, grams of epoxy and the total amount of mixture, mixing vessel included. Why also with mixing vessel? We use always the same type of mixing vessel, meaning it’s weight is constant and we can check weight of mixture without calibrating the scale. If you mix 15 or more batches per session, you know that sometimes you might get distracted by something and then it is better to have a tool to check where you are. We do not like to spoil one gram of epoxy…
Our building process is all about planking so far. Lets look at it one more time. How we made planks by ourselves we covered already in an earlier article. What I want to talk about now is my work experience with bead and cove planks. The process of fabricating bead & cove planks at home is definitely a time consuming process and you have to have specific machinery and patience. But every minute of spending behind the machine is payed back. The planking process with bead & cove planks gives me satisfaction. They lock together very nicely creating one surface. We apply epoxy on the cove side, which makes the work clean and fast without leaking epoxy away from the join. The planks follow the template shape almost perfectly resulting in minimum sanding and fairing. I am very happy we decided to go this way.
Apropos… The journey is the reward. Back when I was riding my bike and Kerstin just agrees with me — I also enjoyed mainly the journey itself. The direction often given by clouds and sun. No specific destination. Sounds familiar? I definitely can feel some similarity. I love the process of building a boat. For me it is a very noble process of joining tiny planks of wood, creating a beautifully curved object.
We love to build and sail boats. So, lets go further.
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| Amas - Planking Vacation | ||
| Amas - Planking | Amas - Lamination |