The Spring air has cooled off a bit this week but things have REALY been heating up inside Naval Yachts shipyard with all the progress and exciting new developments on Project Goldilocks, our just right, just for us new 24m/78’ aluminium XPM78-01 Xtreme Xploration Passage Maker. There is a LOT to cover this week so come join me for a look around and some explanations of this week’s progress.
This slightly distorted fisheye view captures the three Naval Musketeers responsible for all the great work on the hatches that you saw getting started last week. Uğur on the far right then Nihat in the hard hat and WonderWelder Sezgin with his back to us.
If you look closely (click to enlarge any photo) you can make out the jigsaw cut lines in all three hatches.
This is up on the foredeck overtop of our 5m long Master Cabin which has 3 large hatches, one forward on center which puts it directly overtop the vanity sink, one that Uğur is cutting in this photo on the Port side overtop the shower and then one on center in front of the Pilot House windshield where Nihat is standing which puts it right over our Queen sized bed below.
Each of these hatches are 700mm / 28” square and Nihat is standing in the hatch over our shower.
The two rectangular holes in the rear are where the hidden hinge arms sit inside hinge arm boxes which will be welded in next.
You can see one of the drain holes that are on each side where a 20mm / 3/4” ID pipe will carry any water that gets into this Gutter area back into the sea.
We will finish these deck edge corners off with a small router to give them a nice even 3mm radius and then do a bit of cleanup on that milled flat edge on the 8mm inner frame where the hatch seal goes.
However MY favorite spot is going to be sitting on that beautiful bow section of the Rub Rails nicely wedged in between the two vertical railings with my feet dangling over to enjoy the view up there and be Möbius’ hood ornament!
Can you guess what this is?
Or tell you that this has Xtremely thick aluminium foil on one side of thick woven fireproof cloth?
Feels similar to denim blue jeans cloth.
Or that it is fully certified by the Classification societies for large superyachts and commercial ships such as Lloyds, Bureau Veritas, Rena, ABS, DNV and others to be fully fireproof?
These two 25mm/1” thick discs have 3/4” NPT pipe threads on the inside and will soon be fully welded into the aluminium plate bulkhead with matching discs welded to the other side and this is how we take two fuel lines through this WT bulkhead.
If you look down in the photo above at the tank tops aka floor you can see four SAE5 flanges welded into the tank tops where matching flanges for the fuel hose fittings will attach. Two hoses on the right run up to 90 degree elbows in those threaded discs to go through the WT Bulkhead and the two hoses attached to the flanges on the left run up the vertical white tray and then over along the ceiling to get over to the fuel manifolds shown above.
Yet another part of the exciting developments this week was seeing the first wires start to go in. These are some of the cables for lighting up in the Master Cabin and as the weeks go by you will see all those cable trays filling up quickly.
But WAIT! There’s MORE!!!!!
Unzile has been working up in Istanbul lately so most of our discussions of late have been via Email but she has that rare talent to be able to understood eXactly what we meant when we told her things like we were looking for a wood with Xtreme character in its grain, not even and consistent, not too dark, not too light, grain that swirled wildly and differently in each board, not brown, not blonde, some tones of red wine with burgundy and purples. Proof of her talents arrived on Thursday when these four samples were delivered by courier so you don’t need to take my words for it, you can literally see what I mean about Unzile’s talents and the woods we were looking for.
The equally talented Naval cabinetmakers and finishers have been busy making up samples of the veneer laminated on marine plywood panels with solid wood edging and some large radius sold wood corners and then varnishing these. Varnish wasn’t quite dry by end of the day yesterday (Sat) so you’ll have to wait until next week’s update to see how they look when finished, but trust me, it will be WELL worth the wait!
Once we see the finished samples we’ll make our decision of the lucky wood that Möbius’ cabinets wears.
With all the business of Möbius and the many other boat projects Naval has underway, Daddy Dincer did not have time to get me any pictures of the twins for this week’s blog so you’ll sadly have to be content with just the time lapse video overview below.
Whew!!! What a week! Hope you enjoyed watching and reading as much as we have enjoyed living it and we’ll be back next week with more.
Till then, we hope all of you are making good progress with your projects and lives and we can’t thank you enough for taking time out of doing so to join us here. Please do add even more by putting your questions, comments and suggestions in the “Join the Discussion” box below.
I am a real fanatic of the difference between complicated and complex. A follower of – form follows function – KISS principle – elevator speeches – good engineering that results in simple, clean design. Long way of saying I like the results of the work being done. It should and does look simple and clean when finished.
One hint. It’s awfully easy to mix up familiar with friendly when it comes to solutions. Occassional walkthroughs by knowledgeable cruisers but who are naive to your cruiser maybe eye opening. “Oh, that’s how you solved that problem” is a good observation, as is “I wouldn’t do it that way but I see what you’re doing and why” and similar observations of that nature are positive. Function should be immediately obvious from observation by the knowledgeable cruiser.
“What’s that?” is a very bad observation. “What does that do” maybe equally challenging.
Just IMO
Hi John, great to hear from you as always. I must admit I had to read this message several times to understand it and I’ll say thanks for the bit about “Long way of saying I like the results of the work being done. It should and does look simple and clean when finished.” Certainly I know ALL about the “long way of saying” part! 🙂
To your hint, we are fortunate here in the Free Zone with so many other shipyards as well as all the visitors to Naval Yachts that we get a LOT of very knowledgeable people who come by and many fly in from all over the world to look at the boats and yards here, so I take full advantage of the chance to have new sets of eyes and minds critique our boat and the work here as it is one of the best ways of learning I know. Always provokes good discussions, keeps me on my toes and forces me to rethink why we’re doing things the way we are as it is often rather unorthodox so I enjoy the chance to both learn from others as well as the exercise of reviewing my thinking and approach to all this.
While not quite the same this type and way of learning is a large part of the motivation and reward for making these blog posts with all the help we get from our virtual visitors such as yourself.
Thanks for your contributions and all the others and please keep them coming. I assure you I read them all and consider them at length even if it does sometimes take me some time to respond.
Wayne
Hi,
Thanks for all updates of your project.
Would you share a name of brand of the thick aluminium foil are you using to cover EPDM insulation foam?
Hi Waldek, glad to share the info on this cloth backed foil that we are using and finding to work so well. Sorry to have taken me some time to dig up this info and get back to you. This is from Unitex Composites and the web page for this product is HERE. It comes in 1m or 1.5m widths (40/60 in) and is 043mm thick, weighs 480g/m2 or 14 Oz/Yd2 and is rated temperature resistant up to 550C. We are buying it in the 1m wide x 50m roll. Part # is AFR3732A050SR
As I mentioned in the blog I would describe this as feeling a similar to denim blue jeans, a bit thicker but very pliable. What took us a while to find was some cloth backed foil with really thick and durable AL foil that would stand up for many years of use, being rubbed and scrubbed and scratched by equipment and people over time and not tearing or separating. This is all that and more and we are super pleased with it. We are adhering it to 50mm EPDM insulation in most cases where we want to leave the insulation exposed, no panels or covering and still have a surface that will clean up and not get damaged by typical wear and tear. And of course we wanted the additional fire rating AND really like the additional light reflection we get to really help distribute light in places we are using it like our “basement” under the SuperSalon floor.
Being cloth based that doesn’t stretch it is a bit tricky to get to wrap around complex 3D curves and irregular surfaces but being so tough it doesn’t take long to develop some procedures to get it to go on well around inside and outside corners, radii, etc. We are essentially using contact cement to adhere to the EPDM and AL in a few places and then using thick AL foil tape in places where we want to transition a nice edge from the foil cloth to bare AL for example.
Hope this helps with your project and thanks for following on with ours.
Wayne
I follow the Dashew FPB closely, espically the matrix and it’s evolution as I won the contest to name that baby. Here is the latest evolution of the helm
https://setsail.com/cochise-final-matrix-nav-station-a-breakthrough/#more-47665
I confess it does not fit my Fanaticism for things KISS. I’ll have to study it more.
Yes we too have followed the FPB’s for many years now and both Steve and Linda are great teachers who we have tremendous respect for.
I’ve got a long set of notes I’ve been working on for several years now collecting my thoughts about the way we control our boats because I think that a series of new developments with technology, navigation equipment and controllers are combining to let us take a whole new approach to this. It will take me a while longer to get this written up as a blog post but I will get it up here eventually to get into the details and share it with everyone here. I may title the post something along the lines of “Free the Helm” or “Set the Helm Free” as a large part of what I’m doing with our helm design is to try to ignore all the traditional ways and means of controlling boats like these, long range passage makers, and take a complete “do over” approach to the whole setup of navigation equipment, steering, engine controllers, etc. As with the rest of the design of our boat start from scratch with the first principles we want for, in this case, controlling our boat and then selecting equipment and positioning it to enable us to meet all these requirements. In this process I do my best to question everything, a bit like an 8 year old might with a lot of incessant asking (myself mostly) of “Why is it done that way?” or “Why does it go there?” and wonder about why we don’t use new and different bits of kit and technique if it is well proven and just not common to boats or the traditional ways of doing things.
From what I see Steve doing with his “do over” of the helm stations on Cochise I think he has been making similar observations and similarly rethinking all the traditional ways he and Linda have controlled their boats over the years, questioning it all and designing it anew so that it works best for them on their boat.
I’ll leave it at that for now and do my best to put this together into a more coherent article to post as we start installing our nav equipment to suit our new ways of thinking about how and where we will control our new boat. I’m not sure our way of doing this will suit you or others but it will along with this whole endeavour being named “Project Goldilocks” as we work towards creating the just right, just for us boat.
So stay tuned and keep your comments and ideas and critique coming, we most appreciative of it all.
– Wayne