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Remind me again, what sort of boat is this? It doesn't really matter, pro or beginner, the idea of pre-coating, waiting a week and then sanding before finishing the job makes no sense at all. If you...

Wet sanding epoxy to try to remove blush is absolutely stupid. One of the reasons you use the scotch brite pads is because blush quickly plugs up sandpaper, making it worthless. you are also wrong...

Boating and trailering became so much better and less buried in stupid red tape when I moved out of Illinois.

I stick stuff like that, as well as music recordings and occasional videos in my Dropbox account, which was free. You can keep them private or post links so that folks can see them. So far it has...

My experience has clearly shown the opposite. Tapered spars tend to yield much better lateen and small lugsail shape. However, the shape of any small sail is going to depend most on how well the...

The peelply is clearly the thing most likely to screw up your first glassing job, and it's cost is nothing compared to the cost and effort that would be required to fix a bad fiberglassing job....

A 12"trailer tire has an outside diameter in the 21" range. Looking at mine from the stern it looks like the lowest point on the hull might be a couple of inches below the top of the tires. It seems...

If a standard spacing exists, it is generally around 26", though it may be modified a bit as needed by the overall luff length, the height of the tack set-back (if there is one) etc. The original...

Mine are rectangular and about 1.5" x 1.5" in the center. They taper to 1.25" tall by 1" wide at their forward (tack corner) end, and about 1.25 tall by about 3/4" wide at the peak/aft ends. The...

My favorite Wildfire, with a couple of very nice key changes. As for the other type, be careful out there.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLqYd6NqK1U

Bow and stern decks are common and perfectly acceptable standard terms when it comes to talking about wooden canoes, so I wouldn't get too hung up on it. Nobody I know talks about a "foredeck" on a...

If you had ever had to deal with the effect that silicone contamination has when you need to paint or re-varnish something on a boat, you would likely never want anything containing it anywhere near...

James, yes steep hills can be a bear on a trike as you can't stand on the pedals, so you shift way down and whatever you do, you don't stop mid-hill. There is one about 90 seconds into this video,...

ICE Trike dealers

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ICE website:
https://www.icetrikes.co/

I'm all in on adult tricycles. I own two of them and they kick some pretty serious butt. Joe should get one.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_USqzcla16A

If you epoxy coat those items, Gougeon Brothers wants you to apply two coats if it won't be sanded smooth and three coats if you do plan to sand it smooth after application. This is to build enough...

I have a Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker (tall, medicine-capsule-shaped water pan smoker/grill) that I bought in the 1980s. It never seemed to get enough air, so I cut a hole about 10" in diameter in...

The different sail types tend to get kind of blurry at times. Also, the typical Sunfish-style recreational lateen that most of us are used to is not all that similar to some of the more traditional...

Thanks John. There is a lot about sailmaking that can get pretty tedious and/or boring, while you grind up your knees crawling around on a hardwood floor. I always vowed that if I was going to do it,...

Reminds me of this one, which I drew up and mapped out the basic sailplan for at some point - but I can't remember why or who it was for, and I don't recall ever following through on it and building...

I think it's kind of like having a favorite song. It may be your favorite now, but it may not be ten or twenty years from now, so do you really want a saggy, faded image of it permanently etched on...

I suspect that trying to sail it boomless will not allow the sheeting angle to work properly if you only have two and a half feet from boom end to boat end. As for head-knocking with a lateen, the...

There is going to be some really ugly ink around as some of the younger generation age and get saggy. I'm so glad that I was never dumb enough to get any tats, which at the time probably seemed like...

A couple of other things which may or may not be needed in this case, but are worth being aware of:

When glassing over complex shapes the cloth will often drape and conform better if you go in...

You are way too worried about outgassing. Glass the hull and while that first layer is hardening, don't go anywhere. Stay and keep an eye on it, making sure it is free of defects of any sort while...

In many cases, the light is much better during daylight hours as well, and you do want to be watching carefully up until the point where the resin really gets stiff enough that nothing can move. I...

I've always done my glassing in a garage with the door open, starting in the morning and have never had serious outgassing problems. Air pockets under the cloth are much more likely being caused by...

Point of order:
While this rig does not have a conventional boom, it is far from being "boomless". The lowest batten, and when reefed the second batten, are basically the working booms. Without them...

We just got back after a week at our place up north near Rhinelander. A lake in the front yard, and another lake in the back yard. How convenient! Some really serious skeeters at the moment though....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUE7MptbIkQ&t=143s

Yep, it looks like they dumped the 14 and 18 (I think there was also a 17 for a while) and now they have a couple of rotomolds in the line, along with the original 16. I would suspect that there...

I was a Hobie dealer back in the late '70s and have owned Hobie 14s, 16's and an 18. The boat in the photo above looks like it is a 14 Turbo, which has the roller furling jib added to the standard...

John,
Corner patching on old sails could be simple triangles, or sections of circles, usually on smallish sails. Throat patches on four-sided sails might be round or some sort of four-sided or...

There is no way in hell that you would be able to see whether or not the sails were broadseamed at the scale of this sort of drawing. Combine both the stretch of natural fiber cloth (which very often...

I give it a week or better to cure, water wash blush off, sand to120 grit and paint, rolling and tipping. It has always worked fine with Bright side, Easypoxy, and a variety of hardware store...

I do remember hitting some unidentified object with the centerboard of the trimaran once.

You can buy ceramic or glass microspheres either hollow or solid. They are white-ish in color. The hollow kind will make a fairly lightweight filler. The solid ones make a somewhat harder, heavier...

That's what my wife wanted, as she has been using Apple computers for decades at work (molecular biologist) and at one point the university provided iPhones to them during covid. She was somewhat...

I started computer-ing on a Mac and eventually wrote, illustrated and did the initial layout for my book on a first generation Powermac (500 MB hard drive) from about 1995. I still draw on it today,...

In reality, it is not a fair curve. Most broadseaming on cross-cut sails is done with straight tapers, not curves. A "broadseam curve" is an imaginary line established on the plan and/or lofting on...

So today my wife wanted me to go out and buy her an iPhone while she was at work. Being only half a mile from home, I headed over to the local Apple store in a big strip mall. Inside, it was very...

The last time I used peel ply on anything it left a very fine woven texture on the surface. I have never attempted to paint over it, but I suspect the pattern might telegraph to some extent through...

I never prime epoxy/fiberglass. Epoxy resin when sanded nice and smooth is a better primer than just about anything.

Our 20' Farrier tri used to tend to wander back and forth when moored. We ended up using a pretty short line (maybe four feet or so) wrapped around one of those rubber snubbers between the main...

Gee, that gives me an idea.....something about dynamite fishing..... :)

I think the drone and the Hobie Lynx will pair together really well. The Lynx has the pedal-powered Mirage drive and despite...

Yes. You pop off the pontoon frame and pop on a different lower frame with skids and a small mechanism with a hook on the front. The drone has a bright LED landing light on the bottom which you can...

Seaplane Mode

One of the main reasons for getting the drone (Mavic air2) was to follow the Hobie Pedal boards when we're up north on the lake. They have a decent space on the front, but just in...

The chain lube that I use on the trikes is a wax lube that I made after watching a YouTube video, a mixture of melted parafin (I used a couple old pans for a double boiler out in the driveway) mixed...

I added about six inches of beam to my fur trade canoe, in the form of a long cigar shaped addition starting at the bottom of one stem and ending at the bottom of the other stem. Unlike the big...

Talk about two materials which stretch and sag like crazy.........nylon and clear vinyl. Just saying. If you think polyester is bad, just wait.