Workshop eXtraordinaire!!

by Wayne | Feb 17, 2019 | Boat building, Hull | 8 comments

Another very busy week here at Naval Yachts and the weekend even more so with visitors coming to check out our XPM78-01 Möbius in person from the Netherlands and Germany but more on that later.  I’m sure that I am more eXcited than most of you can understand about the newest feature that Team Möbius started working on this week, the workbenches in the Workshop!  But check out the photos below before you judge me and see what you think.  And work also continued on other parts like the cleats and the insulation so let’s jump right in and get your caught up.

Picking up where we left off last week, Sezgin finished TIG welding the cross bars into the double vertical posts of these double cross bollard style cleats that will run along the outer edges of the Rub rails down the length of the boat.

Uğur quickly started to work on getting them installed into the robust Rub Rails.
There are five of these double cross bar bollard style cleats on each side, one on the aft swim platform, one at the very aft end of the Rub Rails, one aft of midships and then these two you see here up near the bow.
My hand will give you a better sense of size and proportion and you can refer to the drawing in last week’s update for exact dimensions. 
The vertical posts run all the way through the top and bottom surfaces of the 10mm plate the Rub Rails are bent from and then welded all around both top and bottom where they enter/exit the Rub Rail.

This shot will give you a sense for how well these cleats are supported with more below the surface than above.

While Uğur and Nihat were busy installing the cleats into the Rub Rails, Sezgin was keeping his TIG gun busy welding in all the stand off pipes for the hand rails running down each side of the Pilot House roof.
This rendering helps to show the ample side decks running along the Pilot House windows with 1m high stanchions and lifelines on your outboard side and the 30mm pipe hand rails on the inboard side.  These handrails will also make great lashing points for stowing things along the upper side decks flanking the sides of the SkyBridge for things like our inflatable double kayak and Grandkid toys when we are anchored.

Moving inside and down in the Guest Cabin and Christine’s Office Hilme and crew are busy working their way forward painstakingly installing all the EPDM insulation.
It is very slow and exacting work to ensure that ALL aluminium surfaces are fully covered and there are no thermal bridges from outside to inside.  The order of application is important too.  10mm thick EPDM is first glued to each of the vertical frames and then the horizontal longitudinal stringers.  Once these are fully covered the 50mm thick EPDM is carefully fit into the larger cavities between these so that the edges of the thick 50mm blocks create a snug fit up against the thinner 10mm foam and everything is fully sealed.

Once they have finished the insulation in areas where wires, cable and pipes will run they can mount all these wire trays on the short vertical pieces of flatbar you can see which have been welded in between the stringer and covered with hard rubber.  These perforated trays provide the perfect platform for quick and secure fastening all the pipes and wires with nylon zip ties.  We are standing in the Guest Cabin here, looking at the Starboard side forward into the SuperSalon as the Galley cabinetry has not yet been installed in the space between them.
Looking forward along the Port hull in the corridor between the Workshop and the aft Guest Cabin you can see how the 50mm EPDM wraps around the undersides of the side decks running alongside the SuperSalon up to the bottom of the windowsills.

And finally let’s get to the REALLY exciting part.  Can you guess what Nihat and Uğur are working on here?
How about if we look from the other end?
Does it help if I show you that there are two of them?
These are the workbenches for my Workshop!  All 11 meters/38 ft of them!  These will be mounted down the Port and Starboard hull sides and run the entire length of the Workshop/Engine Room.  The cut outs are where the workbench wraps around the frames and the outer edges are raised to contain any spills when changing watermaker filters or when I’m working on messy mechanical parts.
It is a bit difficult to show but this rendering looking forward into the Workshop through the aft Swim Platform door shows the basic layout.  Workbenches on either side are in dark purple and you see that there will also be a matching shelf below the workbench surfaces.  Some of these will be used for mounting equipment as shown on the right Starboard side here.
Way back on the far right/Stbd side Meccano Man is busy fine tuning the Kabola diesel boiler with the Calorifier on the shelf below.  The Alfa Laval  fuel centrifuges sits atop the orange Day Tank on his left side and on his right in white is the watermaker up top and the AC Chiller down below.  Some of the other workbench surfaces will provide homes for my Workshop equipment including things like my grinder, drill press, 3D printer, CNC router, air compressor etc. and still leave me plenty of room for working on projects.

Those of you who are DIY’ers and Maker type people, and especially those who have lived on boats for any length of time will understand my excitement at having all this full headroom space and these vast expanses of workbench area but I know most of you will just be shaking your head.  And just wait till I show you my cubic meter of tool chest drawers and other storage you can’t see in this render!

But wait!  There’s more!

We also had some very special guests this weekend when Rob and his daughter Imke flew in from the Netherlands to visit and get up close and personal with XPM78-01 Möbius.
Baris & Dincer joined us and we spent the rest of the day exploring every nook and cranny of Möbius with Rob and Imke. 
Rob looks after Artnautica Europe where two of the five LRC58’s have now been built at the Aluboot yard in Hindeloopen Netherlands.  The other three were built by Dickey Boats in Napier New Zealand.
The LRC58 is the elder sister of these kind of boats which our gifted designer/Naval Architect Dennis first designed with his company Artnautica and then built the first one for himself and his wife Raquel to be their full time home.
  Rob not only manages the European side of the Artnautica world he also had LRC58 #3 built for himself and his wife to spend more and more time exploring the world.  They spent the summer sailing up to Sweden in between dashing back for the birth of not one but two of their newest Granddaughters.  Click on that last link to see photos of the launch of mv Britt last July and you can also follow along through the whole build on this site.

You will also find photos of the building and launch of LRC58 #4 “Raw” at Dickey Boats in New Zealand and proceeded to sail off to her new home in Thailand which is outlined here and then follow along with the build of LRC58 #5 at Aluboot in the Netherlands and watch her get turned upright last month.

It is late Sunday night here now and we’ve had a whirlwind weekend enjoying time with Rob & Imke in glorious sunshine when we weren’t inside Naval shipyards and Möbius.  Thanks for a fabulous time and the great discussions Rob & Imke, look forward to more soon.

Our next visitors arrived this afternoon from Munich to spend time exploring Möbius, Naval Yachts and Antalya with us and I’ll bring you updates on all that in next week’s posting.

Saving the best for last though, here is this week’s other Naval update on the progress that Yiğit and Mert, Dincer’s twin boys have been making.  They have almost doubled their 2.2kg birthweight and are growing every day.  Mum, Dad and brother Demir are also doing well so as you can see it is nothing but growth and progress here at Naval Yachts.

Hope your week and weekend was a fun as ours and thanks for joining us here.  See you again next week.

KISS my Cleats! We’ve been Double Crossed!

by Wayne | Feb 9, 2019 | Boat building, Hull | 2 comments

Another fun week for Team Möbius as they kicked into their mass production mode manufacturing all the shiny new double cross bollard style cleats outside and continued gluing down miles of EPDM insulation on the inside.  Let’s check it out.

You are looking at the production coming out of the cleat factory with most of the finished double cross bollard style cleats stacked up and waiting for final welding into the Rub Rails along both sides. 

But let’s review what led up to this …………….

You will recall these four very different and slightly more eXtreme style and size of  “Crane cleats” which were all welded in a few weeks ago and which are literally strong enough to lift the whole boat by crane, should the need arise. 

These four Crane Cleats enables quick and easy lift and load of Möbius by crane onto any container or cargo ship but we will most likely use them when we need to be hauled out while in very remote and isolated parts of the world, our favorite, and there are no shore side facilities or marinas for hauling out. 

We have run into this situation in the past in places such as the Marshall Islands, Vanuatu, Tonga and parts of Fiji and found that these areas all tend to have commercial shipping or shoreside building projects which have huge cranes  which can easily lift our svelte 45 tonnes from the water to a cradle or pit we can create ashore. 

These Crane cleats will also come in eXtremely handy in the not so unlikely event that we need to haul Möbius out for one of our extended trips to be with our Grandkids and other family and friends while we happen to be in a cyclone prone time and area.  Another experience we have had several times in our boating past.  Once the Crane or other lifting method hauls us out onto the hard, aka land, we can then use these same cleats to tie Möbius down to huge stakes we drive into the ground to help secure her in what could be winds in excess of 200 MPH.  Ask us how we know?

Fortunately that scenario doesn’t present itself too often and even for our eXtremely over engineered XPM eXtreme eXploration Passage Maker, these Crane cleats were Papa Bear size and not the just right Goldilocks fit for the more common needs we’ll have for secure cleats when docking, fueling up, rafting alongside big commercial boats and the many other situations where we need to have super secure lines between Möbius and docks, piers, pilings, etc..

After considering several different cleat styles we have used over the years we decided to go what I believe is technically called a “double cross bollard cleat” which is a mouthful so I’ll just refer to them as cleats now.  These are in keeping with our KISS approach to Keep It Simple & Safe and we have found them to best handle the largest range of types of lines, sizes and options.  

So I fired up Fusion 360 and quickly created the 3D model of the just right sized cleat for Möbius you see above and and then the and 2D drawing on the left.  Good thing I am no longer teaching draughting as I would not have given this drawing a very good grade drafting convention wise! 
However it got the job done and provided all the dimensions and details for our machinist to quickly crank out the three individual parts that make up these KISS cleats with their nicely rounded solid end caps.
Which fit together and are quick tacked like this.
We need 12 of these cleats all together so Uğur quickly created this jig to hold each of the two 60mm/ 2 3/8” vertical bollard posts and the 30mm / 1 3/16” cross bar in just the right position and cranked out all 12 of them in the flash of his MIG welding gun.
and stack them up ready for Sezgin to take over with his
own trusty little jig he made up to hold them while he laid down his beautiful TIG welds around each intersection of the cross bars to the bollard posts.  

Check out this week’s video summary to see Sezgin in action!
And soon this pile formed behind him.
While Sezgin was busy at the bow Uğur, Nihat and Mehmet got to work on the last length of Rub Rail on the aft end of the Starboard side.   The Rub Rail you see laying on top of the deck here was supposed to have gone in here last month but the company that did the bending of these 10mm plates somehow bent this one “backwards” or inside out and the new corrected one just arrived last week.  It is now all fully welded in place to complete the full set of Rub Rails down each side and they can now get to work cutting the holes through for each of the 60mm pipe sockets that hold the stanchion and railing pipe

Down below the deck Sezgin has finished fully welding in all four of those massive Crane Cleats we saw above where they wrap around the tops of the 12mm frame plates, so they are now an integrated part of the hull and ready for action.
Dropping down one level to the Workshop and Engine Room area we find Himi in the foreground who is actually our electrical technician and Faruk who is the head of Naval’s Insulation & Composites team busy in their own mass production factory as they cut miles of the 50mm EPDM foam insulation and glue it to all the interior aluminium surfaces.
Himi is very motivated to get this all done so he can install all the wire trays he has cut and ready to go and then get started with installing even more miles of electrical wires and cables to carry all of Möbius’ electrons traveling at 12, 24, 120 and 240 volts as well as all the data dashing back and forth for all our instrumentation, navigation and communication.
The photo above is looking aft along the Port/Left side and this one is looking forward along the Starboard/Right side of the hull.  The Engine Room is on the far left and the 550L Day Tank will be going in at the far end against the WT Bulkhead with the Guest Cabin & Christine’s Office on the other side.
And finally I will leave you with this zoomed out shot taken from up on mv Legacy, the ship sitting in front of Möbius.  Christine and I spent the day, Saturday, in the yard aboard Möbius working out some of the interior cabinetry details and also took some time to go through Legacy to see all the progress on her major refit.  This shot is taken while we were standing on the bow of Legacy looking down at our beloved  Möbius and thought you would enjoy this perspective.

Of course we can’t leave you without your weekly fix of cuteness from the Dincer twins, Yiğit and Mert and their adoring big brother Demir so here you go!

Hope you enjoyed this week’s progress update and thanks so much for taking time out of your busy day to join us.  Please add your most valued and appreciated comments, questions and suggestions in the “Join the Discussion” box below and I’ll do my best to get back to you ASAP. 

And last but hopefully not least is a very quick video synopsis of this week’s progress building mv Möbius here at Naval Yachts.

Möbius Arch – Turkish Map Fold style

by Wayne | Feb 3, 2019 | Boat building, Hull | 11 comments

Many of you will be familiar with Turkish Map Fold style books if not by name perhaps by having one of these as a map when traveling. 

Team Möbius got our Arch on Möbius in place this week and the all the many functions we have been able to incorporate into the design of this arch it reminded me of the Turkish Map folded books and maps I’ve had and always been fascinated with.  Seems only appropriate that our Turkish built boat would have a Turkish Fold style Arch and hence the title for this week’s update.

You may recall seeing this little animation in an update a few weeks ago and show is always better than tell so I’ll use it again to help you understand how our folding mast works.  Burak kindly put this together for us as we were testing out different configurations and dimensions of this whole system. 

The video makes it all look very simple, and it is remarkably simple but getting the geometry just right so everything fits and clears and the roof ends up in just the right spots when fully up and fully down was tricky and hats off to Dennis, Yiğit and Burak for getting this to all work out so well.

We have gone to this significant amount of work to design and create this folding Arch & SkyBridge roof in order to give us two very significant features or modes:

1.  Canal Mode where by lowering our Air Draft, the distance from the Water Line to the top most part of the boat we will be able to cruise in areas such as the canals or small inland rivers and water ways which have low fixed bridges you have to be able to pass under.   Our Air Draft with the Arch and roof folded down will be about 4.2m/13’ 6” compared to about 6.4m/21ft to the top of the raised Arch, and then the Paravane poles add about another 2m/6.5’ on top of that.

2.  Hunkered Down Mode where we can dramatically reduce our windage, the side area, when we are in areas during cyclone and hurricane season.  Christine and I have spent quite a bit of time in such areas both together and when we were single handing so we have first hand experience with the power and the danger which these severe weather patterns possess such as the 285 km/h winds we saw when Cyclone Winston hit us when we were hauled out on Learnativity in Fiji in 2016.  By dropping our height and essentially eliminating our SkyBridge and putting plywood or Lexan storm coverings over all the Pilot House glass we stand a much better chance of surviving such forces of nature with the least amount of damage possible.

You saw some of the components of this arch being prepped last week as Sezgin and his TIG welder made quick work of welding all the many joints where the various diameter pipes all connected.
Those have all now been lifted up onto the SkyBridge for assembly into the finished arch.  Here is one side of the vertical legs of the Arch being stood in place.
and tacked to the upper half of the big hinge plates on either side.
Uğur and Nihat finished cleaning up the upper arch member with brass wire wheels….
….. and set it atop the two vertical legs, got everything all squared up with the laser level and tacked in place.
Stepping back on the Aft Deck you can see how the vertical pipe legs of the Arch continue below the hinge plates to transfer most of the loads down to the eXtremely strong hull framework and make this arch essentially part of the hull itself.

The vertical pieces under the Aft Deck roof are temporary braces to maintain its location prior to having its supports down to the Engine Room Vent boxes a bit later.
Looking up from the ground will give you another perspective on the Arch in place as it awaits fitting the SkyBridge roof structure and testing out the whole folding mechanism.
This view from the forward Port corner of the SkyBridge provides a good perspective of the size and scale of the Arch.  The rectangular opening in the middle is where the comfy Captain’s chair will sit to create the upper Helm Station and the circular stairs you’ve seen in previous weeks is over to the left in this picture and leads down to the Aft Deck.
Moving aft and standing just behind the Arch provides another view of the SkyBridge layout.  The rectangular holes in the bottom of the Arch top plate creates room for me to work on the many items mounted up here such as Radars, AIS, GPS and many antennae.  There ware slots in the pipe which you can see in the photo above where all the wiring will be very safely carried down inside the Arch tubes to the electrical panel that sits down below the deck where the Port Arch legs attach.
With the Arch all tacked up we could carefully fold it down for the first time and tweak the alignment and fit to get everything just right.
This is about how the Arch will sit when it is fully folded down with the SkyBridge roof fame attached.
From a distance and slightly under water level it looks like this.

Next up we will lift the SkyBridge roof fame you saw being made a few weeks ago, lifted up and fasted to the Arch so we can test out the whole Turkish Map folding system.
Never being ones to rest, Uğur and Nihat were also busy folding up the 6mm aluminium plates that will become the two large Engine Room vent boxes on the aft deck.
This is the ER vent box on the Port side …..
…. and this is the Starboard side vent box.

The cut out area is where our BBQ will be mounted as these two vent boxes will serve double duty as our outdoor Galley with sink, cutting board and storage to join the BBQ.
This rendered view will help put this all into perspective with the two ER Vent boxes in red.  Mist eliminator vent grills will be on the inside surfaces to keep salt water and humidity out and inside each box is a set of baffles to direct air in and out of the ER and others to bring fresh air into the Guest Cabin and Christine’s Office.
The other exciting development this week was the arrival of this truckload full of ……….

………….. can you guess???
The busy little worker ants they are, Naval people appeared out of nowhere …..
…. and within minutes they had the full load moved from here ……..
……. to here.

Did you guess what all these bags are full of?
Correct!  It is all our EPDM foam insulation.  Most of this is 50mm/2” thick which covers all the interior hull plates, underneath all the deck plates and in the interior walls …….
….. with some 10mm / 3/8” for covering the aluminium stringers and frames so let’s show you how this all works.
We experimented and consulted with the manufacturer of the EPDM foam and came up with a 3 stage process. 

First the horizontal stringers are have lengths of 10mm EPDM fully wrapped around them and glued in place with a special contact cement.
Second, more lengths of 10mm EPDM are cut, fitted and
…… glued to the frames.
With all the stringers and frames covered the 3rd step in the overall process is to cut, fit and glue the 50mm EPDM to the aluminium surfaces.
Here is a small test area in the aft Port corner of the Workshop with all three steps completed between four frames and two strips on the ceiling. 
This is a very laborious process as there is a LOT of intricate fitting to the different shapes, sizes and openings that need to be carefully and completely covered.  It is important that the adhesive covers every bit of the aluminium and foam so there are no air bubbles trapped underneath to ensure that no moisture can get in and that there are no thermal bridges created between the aluminium components and the interior spaces and cabinetry.

You will be seeing lots more of this process as it progresses over the coming week and I can explain more about why we are going to such pains to put in this type of insulation and why we believe insulation is one of the most significant factors in making these kinds of eXtreme Passage Makers so comfortable and so efficient in both eXtremely hot and cold areas in the world.

Saving the best bit of progress for last here is this week’s boatload of cuteness to let you know that the Dinc twins Mert and Yiğit also continue to grow and develop eXtremely well.

I hope you are enjoying seeing this all unfold as much as we are and that you will continue to follow along with the whole process of building our just right, just for us Goldilocks boat. 

See you next week!