The Reboot

By Dermot Tynan, about 8 years ago.

According to the calendar, it is now 963 days since my last blog posting on here. A lot has happened in that thirty month period, but not a lot in terms of the robotic boat.

I’ve worked on a variety of designs of winged sail and I think I have a design which will work really well. More about that, anon.

You may also notice I redesigned the blog, and switched from Wordpress to Jekyll. I had originally planned to code a Ruby on Rails site, and this is mostly why there haven’t been any blog updates for the last couple of years. I wanted to incorporate automatic blog updates from the boat when she’s at sea, but trying to decide on a layout for the new blog was like trying to choose the paint colour for the bike shed. Eventually I just went with Jekyll as it allows me to have boat updates, and doesn’t involve spending months tweaking HTML and CSS.

The big news though is a decision I made last year, to switch away from my own hull design, which you can find here: [[56]. Chatting with Professor Paul Miller of the US Naval Academy, I came to the conclusion that the design he and his students had perfected, which they call the MaxiMOOP.

• August 28, 2016
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Hull 002

By Dermot Tynan, about 8 years ago.

I have discussed the hull construction process in earlier posts, which you can find via the above search bar. To recap, you take the hull design and "loft" the shape of each section or bulkhead, from the drawing. You then cut this out of 6mm marine ply (or equivalent), mount each of the stations onto a strongback, and now you have something which forms the shape.

I also need to add a keelson to the picture. A keelson is a long, keel-like piece of wood which runs from stem to stern, connecting the bulkheads. I cut one already but it turned out to be too short due to a miscalculation on my part. Generally I cut a thin (about 2cm wide) outline of the keel of the boat, from a sheet of ply.

• September 24, 2016
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