It was a full work week here for Team Möbius at GreeNaval and as you are about to see, the progress to match. As per my attempt at a fun title the focus this week was on the two ends of the boat, the Bow and the aft Engine Room & Workshop and much more progress on putting up more hull plates. The shape of the boat is now coming into focus more and more on an almost daily basis and you will need less and less “AI” or Augmented Imagination to visualise what the finished hull will look like. LOTS to show you and pictures are much better than my words so I’ll jump right in.
Starting right side up here is what the finished bow will look like viewed from the Port side. We’ve made a few modifications since this early rendering such as just one Samson post but these shots are pretty close to what the final bow will look like. The tiny little 125kg/275 lb snugs right up to the eXtremely robust anchor roller assembly Dennis has designed and you’ll see that “in the flesh” in the pictures below. The access hatch you see on the aft Starboard side is for getting in and out of the very large storage space below the Foredeck.
Both these renderings show quite clearly how the anchor deck area slopes down to that big solid aluminium “doughnut” in the very front of the bow so that all the anchor muck and deck water is all self draining and runs right off and out through that big solid AL doughnut. We try to have as many parts on the boat as possible serve double duty and the primary purpose of this doughnut is to run our snubber line out to the anchor chain with a well centered and fully faired exit/entry. For a snubber we typically use a length of triple strand nylon, about 5-10 meters which we clip onto the chain once the anchor is set and then tied to the boat on that Samson post and the anchor chain let out so that all the tension is on the snubber. The stretchy nylon acts like a shock absorber as the winds and waves come up in an anchorage and takes the load off the windlass.
To help with both your orientation and visualisation, this is what the finished bow framing will look like, viewed from its current upside down perspective.
OK, now that you are all oriented, here is how the real bow looked on Monday morning (June 18, 2018). That wide vertical plate, known as a Stem bar curves around the bow and heads back down the centerline of the entire hull creating a single 25mm thick Keel Bar running all the way to the very aft end of the swim platform. It is massive in the eXtreme, many times more than the most stringent of any open ocean class certifications and that is very purposeful on our part as yet another SWAN or Sleep Well At Night factor.
Stepping back a bit to put the bow in perspective relative to the rest of the hull you can also see that anchor roller assembly in these shots and begin to get an idea of just how eXtremely robust this critical part of the boat is. It is all made of 15mm plate which extends back over 1.5 meters into the deck framing and becomes part of a very rigid bow framing assembly. In future posts you will see how this bow roller is further reinforced with gussets on the sides to connect it the inner hull sides and become even stronger.
Getting “up close and personal” here is a bit more of a close up view of the business end of the anchor roller cheeks.
This aft view looking forward shows more of the construction and the flared out cheeks which will have an additional pair of AL pads welded on to provide a very solid surface for the blade of the anchor to snug up to and be able to take the brunt of large waves we will be piercing while underway. You can make out the two holes on the side which are for axle pins for the dual nylon/UHMW anchor rollers for the anchor and chain ride on as they come in and out.
Off to the side of the bow is this stack of triangular bow stringers which are about to be fitted into those slots you might have noticed in the shots of the Stem Bar above.
This is more examples of the interlocking “kit” like nature of this construction technique. The large slots at the peak slide around the Stem Bar and then the last 35mm/1.5” or so slides into those slots you saw above.
Like this. That is Frame #1 and it was left loose so as to allow room for those triangular stringers to slide into the Stem Bar and then moved upright so each of the tabs in the aft end of the triangular stringers would snap into place into the little rectangular slots you can see if you look closely here.
You’ll see here that the opposite Stbd. side is a bit different with these horizontal flat bars welded to the edges of each triangular stringer. The bow hull plating will begin with the Port side, the one with no flat bars, and Sezgin the Master Welder can easily reach through with his MIG welder from this still open Stbd side and run his welds along each stringer. But once the Port side has been welded up he has no access to get in and weld the Stbd. side hull plates, so the slot welding technique we talked about last week will be used where there are elongated round ended slots cut into the Stbd. hull plate which line up with these flat bars so Sezgin can fill each slot with weld and secure the hull plate to the stringers. As with many such welds in the outer hull these will all be carefully ground flat and flush with the hull plate and become invisible.
Literally hot off the press or MIG welder you can see some of the finished welds and appreciate just how incredibly strong this bow will be even before the 12mm/ 1/2” bow plating goes on.
Looking forward from the backside of Frame #1, more of the finished welds and a good shot of how all those tabs in the aft edge of each stringer slot into the Frame bulkhead and get welded up.
This is smaller in size but very similar to the slot welding technique I described above.
OK, with the bow pretty much all framed in, let’s head aft to the other end of Möbius and rewind the clock to Monday morning to see where we start back there.
While we have made a few changes to some of the details this earlier rendering is close to what the finished Swim Step will look like. Right side up of course!
So now flip your brain once more and we’ll get back to the upside down reality views of the Swim Step.
Uğur is busy slotting each stringer into the aft frames and the very aft end of the boat quickly starts to take shape.
With most of the stringers which form the Swim Step now in place you can begin to see how this 1.4m/4.5’ long Swim Step will provide a great platform for getting on/off the Tender, diving off, snorkeling, fishing, etc. Can’t wait!!!
As you can see the swim step also provides some significant additional storage space underneath. We will use this for longer term storage of items such as our spare CPP propeller blades and other such infrequently used items. This is because we don’t want to put access hatches in the Swim Step deck as they introduce a possible leak and because they would need to be flush there would be a groove between the hatch lid and frame which would collect water and stay wet most of the time and become moldy and dirty. No thanks! Therefore we will weld the Swim Step platform with no external access ports to keep it fully sealed from the exterior and nice and dry on the inside.
Meanwhile along the sides, Enver and Umit are busy adding more 6m/20ft lengths of hull plates to each side. To prep the deck for this they temporarily weld in these lengths of flat bar and clamp the deck plate to it every 15mm/6” or so to ensure the deck stays completely flat as they tack the hull plate along the deck edge.
With the deck edges all nice and flat the 2nd 6m/20’ length is now tacked in place.
And soon thereafter the first of the 10mm thick plates is tacked in place. You can see another use of temporarily tacked in place flat bar along the lower 6mm plate to keep that edge perfectly flat as the upper 10mm plate is tacked to it.
The framing for the future option of active stabiliser fins is in this area so the 10mm plate is notched for the thicker 12mm plate to be fitted as the hull curves down through the waterline and under the boat.
In case you were wondering how the transition between different thickness hull plates is formed, this will show you how it works. The frames have a notch cut in them where each transition from one thickness to the next will be and this allows for the two different thickness plate seams to stay flush and smooth on exterior of the hull. The small step between the two different plate thicknesses is welded up on the inside. You can also see here how all the edges of each plate have been carefully routed with these 45 degree chamfers to create the V grooves on the inside for a full penetration weld.
Nearing the end of the work week on Friday afternoon Umit is busy tacking in more of the 10mm plate.
Ever present in the background is the endless careful preparation of each of the thousands of pieces so that they are all clean and smooth and ready for their turn to join their mates in the hull.
And to add to the excitement and progress this week our container arrived from Miami containing all our worldly possessions. The container actually arrived here in Antalya last week but it took a week of bureaucratic paperwork and fees, fees, fees to get it on a truck and sent over to our apartment which is what you are seeing here.
Burak, with his cell phone, was kind enough to come over and help out with some of the unloading and translations and in less than an hour we had all of it up on the elevator to our 9th floor apartment and stowed in one of our spare bedrooms to await our unpacking. The other half of the shipment is still in the container and will go to Naval shipyard with all my machines and tools and boat supplies which will ultimately end up on Möbius once she is built and ready to launch next year.
So that is the week that was June 18-22 here with Team Möbius. Hope you enjoyed this weeks update and thanks again for joining us.
Do please add your questions and suggestions in the Comments section down at the very bottom of this blog post.
And as always, here is your reward for getting all the way through this or being smart enough to jump here first and watch this week’s synopsis video. See you again next week!
.
She is getting her shapes very quickly, and very quickly starting to look very big, with those tiny humans for scale!
Anchoring system looks very very solid to my eye. I fully agree on your reasoning for having just one big anchor, but still another mount for another on the other side while welding (*) and building would have added minimal work. Sometimes you simply would be happy to at least have an option of lowering another anchor, it could happen for various reasons. It could be different type for different bottom, weird wind / current combo with limited swing room, or simply someone less lucky tangling your anchor or even worse lifting it up. Another anchor would make a difference of very stressful situation vs having all the time in the world to sort it out. Anyways it is like it is, and looks good!
Also I would add a small detail, a drain “cup” and emptying hole for it under the snubber doughnut. This way the doughnut and snubber line would stay little bit more clean and not get that extra abrasion from sand/dirt dripping from anchor chain. Just my 2c. Of course you can wash the chain and doughnut every time, but still.
* btw friends don’t really like seeing friends welding in t-shirt, even though I fully understand it is hot in the shed. Those UV rays and hot sparks and all that.
Or install a rounded horizontal flat bar in the (lower?) middle part of the doughnut. Snubber goes above, dirt, sand and water goes below.
Hi Andy, interesting suggestions and ideas as usual, however the 2nd anchoring system on the bow doesn’t make sense for us. We made that call quite a while back in the design phase and we are now way past the point of making such significant changes to the framing of the hull. It would also have required a 2nd windlass and retrieval system, more clutter on deck, more weight foreward, more complexity and more costs. These are all judgement calls each of us must make when designing or modifying our boats and when we factor in the probability of the scenario you cite of loosing an anchor or needing a different anchoring solution for different bottoms, etc. the decision was clear for us. We had a much smaller 70kg Rocna on our previous 33 ton 52ft steel sailboat and over the course of anchoring her all over the world we did have several incidents where other boats dragged in storms and their anchor picked up our chain but our anchor never moved and in 2 such incidents saved two unattended boats from destruction by “borrowing” our anchor. Mobius will have an even larger 125kg Rocna/Manson and larger chain so I think it is reasonable to expect that we are very well setup for pretty much any bottom, limited swing room or other boats borrowing our anchor. Using these heavy anchors brings the benefit of being able to use much less scope most of the time so our range of swing radius is also very high and gives us more options.
No need for the added complexity of a drain cup I don’t think. The doughnu tube is at a very good down angle so it will drain by design very well I think. We treat snubber lines as expendable and easily replaceable and they tend to need replacement due to internal heat from stretching action much sooner than they do from abrasion and this has worked out well for us on previous boats. We do carry and use old fire hose that fire departments around the world have been more than willing to donate to us and use these for anti abrasion sleeves on dock lines, snubbers and the like. Cheap and simple, two of our all time favorite features!
Thanks for your concern about our welding well being but no cause for alarm here thanks as you are only seeing tack welds for the most part so the exposures are very minimal and the cooler clothing in these climates wins out. Sezgin who is our Master Welder is the only one who does longer continuous welding, and a LOT of that, so he fully covered and protected but you won’t see him showing up in too many photos as he is usually buried away in tanks or other locations inside where assemblies are ready for such continuous welds.
Keep the good ideas coming please, just keep in mind that this is our full time home and that we are most often in extremely remote loctions far from any outside help so our prioritisation of things like simplicity, robustness, lack of moving parts, safety and such are likely an order of magnitude higher than would be the cast for most other use cases. Even with all of this it takes enough of our time to maintain and fix and while I enjoy this to a large extent we are out there to enjoy the passages and the anchorages and spend the majority of our time doing so, hence the focus on reducing maintenance and liklihood of breakages.
-Wayne
Thanks for response, and very thorough explanation. Your reasoning regarding anchoring is 100% solid, as long as you are alone with no other boats. However when someone lifts your only remaining anchor, then it is a different story, that is where I would be more happy to finish my morning coffee after lowering the second anchor.
Another situation that comes to mind, is high latitudes and ice. If your only anchor ever ends up under even small piece of ice (small piece = few meters / tons), it will be much harder to retrieve without another anchor. I have done this myself a couple of times, it is not easy to free it if there is any load in the chain. However if you unload the chain and mark it with retrieval line and float, ice usually just drifts over it and you can retrieve it later.
Yes, we are very confident and happy with our anchoring system and all the more so as we see it take shape for real here in the shipyard. I realise you would do differently and want to have a second main anchor but in our experiences so far we don’t see the probability of another boat “lifting” our anchor. As for the scenario you describe of having the anchor covered by an icy berg, if this did occur we would either just stay longer and wait or choose to manually deploy our 2nd anchor normally used for kedging and stern anchoring. I’m not sure I would have much confidence in setting a main anchor loose from the boat with floats on the end of the chain and finding that still floating after a the ice has moved on but I will defer to your experience.
In such circumstances I would be more inclined to let out some chain and move the boat so I could have a different line and angle to pull on the chain and set the anchor free.
So I think we are covered for such scenarios, at least in our minds.
OMG.. it’s so big!!.. and love the swim deck!. Cheers J
Hey there Mike and Jennifer! Thanks for joining us and wish we could do the same with your upcoming IOC voyage. She is indeed big, looks even more so out of the water and looking up/down at the entire hull, and much longer than when we first started thinking about building a new boat 3 years ago. Several factors helped to change our minds primarily that there is just no getting around physics in that the longer the WL the higher the hull speed which is one of the biggest factors in not only the 24 hour distances we can make on a passage but by going with an eXtremely low D/L ratio and a very long and skinny more sailboat like hull we also reduce the power/fuel we need to maintain a high average cruising speed and range.
We also realised that not all meters/feet are the same in a boat, much like each square meter/foot of a home is not the same. Cost per square m/ft of an empty basement vs cost of a kitchen for example. In our case we settled on going for an “empty ends” approach I have explained in some detail in previous posts where we are keeping the forepeak and aft underdeck areas quite large and relatively “empty” compared to the 3 living spaces of the two cabins and the SuperSalon. In the end we have about 13 meters of living space and the rest of the 24 meters is “empty ends”. This keeps costs down considerably and perhaps even more importantly keeps weight down and centered where we want it. So we are very long, very skinny, very low and very light when compared to other boats which can safely cross oceans such as trawlers. Not everyone’s cup of tea to be sure but fits us just right and that’s all that matters.
Thanks again for dropping by and we look forward to hearing all about your IOC passage and safe crossing soon.
– Wayne
“Ever present in the background is the endless careful preparation of each of the thousands of pieces so that they are all clean and smooth and ready for their turn to join their mates in the hull.”
Didn’t you mention some time ago about hopes to reduce prep time in the future through different cutting techniques and piece preparation?
Sorry for the confusion John. I did indeed mention some thoughts about reducing prep time but these are in the “lessons learned” category and comments about future boat builds. Naval is building a new shipyard a few blocks over in the Free Zone and construction is going well with a move in date by end of this year. So there is more and more work being done on the new equipments to install, new layouts of rooms and areas, storage systems, etc. with a view towards efficiency, reduced build times, costs, etc. In addition to soon being our full time home XPM78-1 Mobius will serve in part as a test bed for these XPM line of boats and it is in these contexts that I was making my comments about what we have already learned from this build. All the AL plate was received several months ago so all that cutting has been done and that’s what we have to work with. But Naval intends to bring CNC in house with the new shipyard and future builds will benefit from that and can dramatically reduce the human hours involved in handling and prepping the thousands of pieces that go into one of these boats. However as usual with a boat it is all a balancing act with a symphony of compromises so as Tesla and Elon Musk recently discovered you can go too far with automation, at least with current state of the art and end up spending more time. An example to me with building these all CNC cut boats is that I don’t think there will be a better automated option for some processes such as cleaning up the naturally oxidised surfaces where welds will soon be applied. For one you want to wait to do this till as close to the weld time as possible and it is pretty quick to do this with a wire wheel in a angle grinder by hand in more of a JIT basis. Certainly could be done by mounting a wire wheel of equivalent on the Z axis of a CNC machine and doing it that way, but when you factor in the time it takes to mount and dismount each part and have the programming for path of the wire wheel I’m not sure that it would be enough of a difference to warrant using the CNC for this role.
Thanks – in sync now
Weld quality. How is the weld quality being insured?
Timely question John as we are approaching the first weld inspections in the next month or so. Up to now it has been mostly spot welding but as the assembly of the AL parts approaches to ensure that the interlocked hull is as modeled and the hull plates go on, the continuous and final welding will commence. Our current plan is to bring in certified welding officials 2-3 times during the building of the hull and prior to the CE certification of the hull. We will do additional penetration and porosity tests on our own to supplement these. For the most part, weld quality is largely determined by the skill and techniques of the welders and we have all fully certified welders doing the work who I work beside very day here so I am able to add this subjective sense to the official tests.
I will do my best to get some pictures of these tests as they are performed and post them in that week’s update here.
Obviously weld quality and overall hull integrity are an eXtremely big deal to us as our lives quite literally depend upon it. This was a significant factor in our builder decision and every day since we decided upon using Naval Yachts we have had that decision confirmed so we are very pleased and confident that Mobius will keep us eXtremely safe and well taken care of on passages and at anchor around the world.
I’ve been in structures whose build specs called for every inch of weld to be tested (by various specified means) and been baffled how a particluar weld could have been subjected to the specified test. It seems that the testing needs to be done during fabrication to really test every inch. And don’t get me started on the statistical variation in the testing process!
I’m thinking that there is a certain amount of redundancy in the design of Mobius to permit some localization of a weld failure?
In case you haven’t guessed, I’m a bit hung up on Black Swans.
Günaydın/Good Morning John.
We certainly would be in heated agreement on the critical need for quality welding in a hull we trust our lives to. However, I don’t think inspecting and testing every weld is realistically possible nor necessary. My purpose in testing is to simply verify my assumptions that our welders are highly experienced, qualified and doing excellent work throughout the entire build. As I mentioned in the post the plan is to do some official testing about 2-3 times during the hull building process. We will bring in certified weld inspectors and related equipment to do this and they will randomly select several strategic locations to test. They will also use a variety of NDT (non destructive) testing techniques such as radiographic (X-Ray), Ultrasonic and liquid penetrant.
As you are likely picking up in my posts and answers my approach to most things is to do as much as I can to ensure that we start with a solid high quality product or system to begin with, be diligent in keeping it that way during use and practice “readiness for the unexpected” by being equipped with the skills, knowledge, information, tools and materials such that we can deal effectively with the inevitable failures, problems and random “Black Swan” type events when, never if, they happen.
When it comes to welding, experts point to a similar perspective I think and Lincoln welding summarises it nicely for me:
Whatever inspection techniques are used, paying attention to the “Five P’s” of weld quality will help reduce subsequent inspection to a routine checking activity. Then, the proper use of NDE methods will serve as a check to keep variables in line and weld quality within standards.
The Five P’s are:
1. Process Selection – the process must be right for the job.
2. Preparation – the joint configuration must be right and compatible with the welding process.
3. Procedures – the procedures must be spelled out in detail and followed religiously during welding.
4. Pretesting – full-scale mockups or simulated specimens should be used to prove that the process and procedures give the desired standard of quality.
5. Personnel – qualified people must be assigned to the job.
We are doing our best to follow a similar regime and will do the weld testing within this context.
As with pretty much everything on boats if not life, “best” is a completely relative term most often incompletely stated with glaringly absent context. IMHO, the question is “what is best for me and my situation”. Perhaps this helps to better understand why from the very beginning germ seed of this idea we referred to this as Project Goldilocks and strive to design and build the “just right, just for us” boat. Welding and the overall hull design and construction is the current example of how we are executing on that approach.
Your question about whether we have “…. a certain amount of redundancy in the design of Möbius to permit some localization of a weld failure?” tells me you understand our approach and we definitely have worked with Dennis to design in as much safety and ways too mitigate something such as weld or other failures/damage to the hull. Some obvious examples that have already been displayed and discussed in the posts to date include things like having the completely sealed “crash chamber” at the peak of the bow, having almost all the hull surfaces below the waterline be tanks and having 5 watertight bulkheads along the overall length of the hull which create 5 (not including the crash chamber) independent compartments.
I think that we need to accept that there is never going to be a truly “unsinkable” ocean crossing boat, at least not one we would be willing to live in full time and that there will always be some inherent risk in what we do. Our goal is to reduce the risk and probability of failures that would “sink” us or even cause us to have to alter our plans significantly, to an acceptably low number and give us the confidence we’ve learned we MUST have in our boat so that we can GO wherever and whenever a new destination calls our name.
-Wayne
Outstanding!
By the by, I’ve managed to start two different threads on the same topic. My apologies.
Enough for a bit
Thanks