This week’s progress on the good ship Möbius continued from last week to focus on installing the miles and miles of EPDM insulation and the seemingly miles of workbenches for my Workshop. The title’s reference is to a video game my son Skyler used to play when he was a young boy back in the 90’s called as I recall “Monster Truck Madness” and it had this phrase “When it’s going your way, it’s going your way” spoken by a great narrator and which I also heard hundreds if not thousands of times as my home computer desk was beside Skyler’s so it has become indelibly etched into my memory banks and became a bit of our families inside jokes that we still reference. As I was thinking about this week’s progress that same narrators voice repeated that phrase in my head and seemed to be just the right title for this post.
But of my reminiscing and let’s get to the photos.
Picking up where we left off last week, Uğur is busy tacking the 50mm / 2” flat bar edging to the 6mm / 1/4” aluminium plate for one of the workbenches that line both sides of the Workshop. 
This quick render looking forward into the Workshop from the door on the Swim Platform helps to visualise the scale and placement of these workbenches in purple and the matching shelves immediately below them.
Combined these two workbenches are over 11m / 36’ long with the same length of shelves underneath and all of you who have workshops for any kind of work from sewing and quilting to machining and woodworking will appreciate just how valuable this much working space is. To have all of this with full headroom on a boat is Xtreme to say the least.
Once Uğur and Nihat have everything cut, fitted and tacked, Sezgin came in with his MIG welder to lay down the continuous beads and get the workbenches ready to be mounted in the Workshop.
Mehmet takes over with his various sizes and shapes of wire wheels and cleans everything up and puts in all these random swirl patterns which I find more beautiful every day.
Two halves of the Starboard side workbenches in the foreground and the Day Tank behind all clean and “swirled” ready to be installed inside the Workshop.
The larger brackets in the foreground are for mounting the lower shelves onto the frames in the Workshop and the smaller ones in the background by the Day Tank are the mounts for the upper workbenches.
As soon as the brackets are all welded and cleaned up Nihat and Uğur take them into the Workshop and drill the frames for the SS bolts that will hold them all in place.
We are bolting the workbenches and shelves in place rather than welding so they are easily removed if I want to modify them over time to accommodate different machines or want to add other extensions.
The laser level makes it quick and easy to get each bracket on the same level and height. My camera lens distorts the position of these brackets but I can assure you they are dead flat and level.
And ready for the shelves and workbenches to be brought aboard and bolted in place. This is the Starboard side of the Workshop looking forward to the bulkhead of the Guest Cabin & Christine’s Office where the Day Tank will soon be mounted. Here you see the lower shelf in place and the top workbench ready to be fitted.
Kneeling in the WT doorway looking aft along the Port side this underside shot shows how the brackets work and also show just how Xtremely massive the framing is on these XPM hulls. The upper workbench is made up of two pieces bolted together by the matching flange you can see where the two halves join and those will be aligned when they drill the holes and bolt these together.
The height of the workbenches might look too tall here but the removable flooring grid is not in place yet which sits about 15cm / 6” above the tank tops and this puts the workbench surface 1m / 39” above the floor which I find is the Goldilocks height for my height to be the most comfortable working height.
Looking forward along the Port side looking forward to the WT door into the Corridor beside the Guest Cabin the workbench and shelf have been set in place ready to be drilled for their mounting bolts.
The EPDM insulation is now installed to below the wire trays so as you can see here they have now been riveted in place.
Speaking of insulation and moving forward into our Master Cabin we can watch the EPDM insulation being installed up here. The sequence is to wrap each longitudinal stringer wtih 10mm EPDM, then wrap the vertical frames with more…..
….. and then carefully squeeze lengths of the 50mm EPDM in place like this.
The vertical flat bars for the wire trays are covered with hard rubber strips to keep them fully ground isolated from the hull which is particularly important for any metal boat.
It is very exacting work to install the nautical miles of EPDM foam which is the one downside of this type of insulation but we regard this as a wise investment given the huge benefits we will enjoy throughout our time aboard our “Thermos bottle” that keeps us Xtremely comfy in all climates and requires the least amount of energy to do so.
Once you have lived aboard a super well insulated boat as we did for years on our previous steel sailboat Learnativity, and you experience not only the thermal comfort but a near silent boat, there is just no going back.
Keeping us all the more busy and putting even bigger smiles on our faces this past week was that we had a baby back in the house! This is 11 month old George who is the son of a couple who flew into Antalya from Germany to meet with Naval Yachts and spend a few days climbing through Möbius as they contemplate having their version of an XPM built for them. They want to establish a charter business for Xtreme Xpeditions taking divers and other adventurers to Greenland, the Arctic and Antarctic and after years of searching for the just right boat to do so they think they have found it in the XPM type of boat. Between all their time in meetings with Naval and aboard Möbius we had a delightful 3 days with them. We SO miss our grandchildren when they were this age so it was a particularly fun filled week for us two Grandparents as we reveled in the joys of as Christine put it “having baby giggles again”.
I only managed to capture a few bits of this week’s progress on video so here is a short set of clips for you to get that perspective on the progress of Team Möbius.
Thanks very much to all of you for taking your valuable time to join us on this grand adventure and don’t forget to add your questions, suggestions and ideas in the “Join the Discussion” box below.
See you next week!
Wayne & Christine
Great story, as always!! 🙂
This is so fun to watch your dream take shape. The craftsmanship is just awe-inspiring.
Thanks Flywright, glad to have you join us for this fun ride.
We too are delighted with everyone here on “Team Möbius” that Naval Yachts have assembled with us. I think that you can find very good skilled labour in many countries but it is not just about skill per se as I have always found in any field that I’ve worked in that “attitude” counts at least as much and this seems more difficult to find in may places. Attitude is also something you can’t train for or make up for, people have it or they don’t it seems to me.
In our context here I’m referring to attitude as the care, attention and pride everyone working with us here has and I find that much more difficult or spotty to find in many other countries. So I spent quite a long time, almost 2 years, searching for our Goldilocks “just right, just for us” builder and I was paying particular attention to this “attitude” in my visits to the various yards around the world. This is very subjective of course and you never know till you have spent some time and seen the actual results but after working with Naval for over a year we continue to be more and more impressed by each one of the people we work with here.
They all have a high degree of pride in what they are doing and really care about the results they are producing, always looking to improve, find better ways of doing things and work with me to do so. The word “passion” get’s thrown about and overused but it seems to fit well with what we are experiencing and as you noted with the results they are producing. Each one of them love to show me what they’ve just done, wait to see my reactions and just beam and smile as I discuss it with them.
My remarks here are not meant to be disparaging to any other builders or countries and I’m not suggesting that this is “the best” or only place or shipyard that can produce these results, simply that this is a great fit with us and we could not be happier to have found our just right, just for us builder.
Appreciate you noticing the craftsmanship here Flywright and I will do my best to continue to show you and others here more as the build continues.
Wayne,
Have several questions, but I’ll narrow to three, none of which are directly related to this week’s post.
1. How do you minimize the black dust from aluminum oxidation that must be part of owning a raw aluminum boat?
2. Big fan of the Gardner engines and always wondered why more passagemaker designs didn’t incorporate variable pitch props. It’s obvious you’ve given a lot of “belt and suspenders” thought to the design and systems. Are there any special maintenance concerns or risks of failure that you have to consider with the more complicated VPP design vs. the KISS straight solid shaft from a reduction geared traditional transmission?
3. I may have missed it, but besides your solar, battery, and main engine alternator plans, will there be any stand alone generator?
Really love following the build. Thanks for including us!
Lawrence aboard Saddle Tramp
Sorry for the slow response and thanks for your interest and questions Saddle Tramp. Glad glad you are enjoying the build along with us. I’ll do my best to answer your questions and don’t hesitate to let me know as more pop up.
1. Re the “black dust” from aluminium oxidization, it is something we have wondered about and discussed a great deal and factored into our design of things like hand rails and such. I guess the most honest answer is that we won’t really know until we have lived aboard for a few months. However based on my experience with aluminium on previous boats and talking with others we don’t think it will be much of a problem. While we are in the process of building and all the surfaces are being freshly wheeled or ground there is of course a lot of “black dust” everywhere but once the initial layer of aluminium oxide has formed it is a very hard and durable coating that should be relatively inert. We’ve tried out some of the aluminium surfaces that have not been ground or wheeled and therefore have a good aluminium oxide layer which doesn’t seem to rub off on our hands. I’m sure there will be some but we have very minimal situations where our skin will be in direct contact with raw aluminium so we think it will work out fine.
In actual day to day use we won’t have much contact with the bare aluminium other than a few hand railings so our thinking is that we’ll live aboard and use the boat for awhile and see how this works out in reality. Our current thought is that if we find that our hands are being blackened by our day to day use of the handrails for the stairs and such then we can wrap these with small diameter rope or even leather much the same as we’ve done for large steering wheels on our previous boats. Almost all the deck surfaces are covered with something like Treadmaster material so your feet don’t tend to be in contact much with the aluminium deck surfaces either.
I would certainly be very glad to receive more feedback from you or others who have first hand experience with living aboard aluminium boats or other similar situations and can add to this discussion.
2. Glad to meet another Gardner Guy and we are super happy with our choice there. I’m as puzzled as you are as to why CPP props are not more common in North America and especially for passage makers where the benefits of CPP fit particularly well. I have run into CPP props on some commercial fishboats, ferries and the like but no where near as common as in Europe.
So I spent a lot of time going through the differences between a fixed prop propulsion system vs. CPP and my conclusion is that in the end the two are about the same degree of complexity and perhaps even less for the CPP system. Obviously the CPP prop itself is more “complex” than a solid fixed prop and shaft but the mechanism in the CPP prop and in the shaft is all purely mechanical with just a rod that slides fore and aft a bit inside the bored out center of the shaft which then in turn push/pulls a round disk that transfers the shaft movement to the ends of the blades to turn them. The bigger difference between the two systems is with the “transmission” in that our CPP “servo gear box” has no forward reverse gears, just the two always engaged reduction gears so that ends up being relatively “simple” as well and fewer moving parts. With no forward/neutral/reverse gear changes and their inherent wear and shock loading in the CPP system there is much less wear and the whole propulsion system has almost no sudden shock loading with the gradual transition from forward to reverse being smoothly accomplished by the pitch going through zero or “neutral”. Everything that rotates in the whole CPP propulsion system is rotating in the same direction all the time, even when the boat is in “neutral” when the pitch is zero.
I’ve always had good experiences with traditional transmissions and fixed or feathering props like AutoProp so I have not found these to be prone to much failure but I think our CPP servo gearbox will prove to be extremely robust and even more trouble free for a very long time.
The other “belt & suspenders” thing I’ve done with our CPP propulsion system is to have Nogva make up an extra set of four spare blades that we will carry aboard. My experience with props being damaged during use is that it usually only affects one blade and so there is a bit of an advantage to the CPP setup being able to replace just one damaged blade without having to remove and replace the whole prop.
3. You didn’t miss anything as we will have no generator onboard. What we’ve done instead is to way oversize our 24v battery bank and solar panel system such that we will only likely ever see discharge rates of about 20-25% in a given day and be able to easily fully recharge the battery banks each day as well from the solar panels, even in higher latitudes on cloudy days and be able to be on anchor pretty much indefinitely. When underway or if needed if we were to lose the use of one or more of our 14 solar panels, we have two 250A 24V alternators on the mighty Gardner which together can generate up to 12kw and enable us to run anything and everything onboard while underway and keep the batteries fully topped up. I will provide more details on our electrical system as we get into that part of the build but the basic numbers are that we will have two 24v battery banks made up of 24 individual 2v Gell cells and giving us about 2150A @C20 so about 51.6kw total capacity and we then have four banks of solar panels made up of 14 individual 360-380W panels that add up to 5-5.3kw of solar output.
Hope that answers your questions reasonably well and don’t hesitate to ask more if not. Thanks again for joining us and even more so for these thoughtful questions.