Duck Flat is building 3 OZ Mk2 PD Racers

Well, I've just had a big day up at Duck Flat Wooden Boats doing some work on the 3 PDRacers they are building for the nationals at Goolwa in March.

I'm not the only person working on them. Robin Badenoch has been in and more or less finished the masts and is on his way with the foils (centreboards and rudders). He had also made a good start with precoating the plywood sheets with epoxy.

The picture right shows the blank with grooves routed to provide a guide for an accurate hydrodynamic profile. The second shows Rob sanding the foils down to the routed grooves after coarse planing. Normally you use a template that is supplied with our plan - but I made up the router jig for use at Duckflat - they can supply routed blanks if you want to save time and effort.

Duckflat are aiming at keeping their boats for the long haul and minimising maintenance - so a full three coats of epoxy over the panels makes a lot of sense - that way they will be less maintenance than a fibreglass boat.

My job was to get the hulls underway.

I was up there yesterday and laminated three pairs of chinelogs - here are one of the pairs pic right.

The first part of the day was sanding. Just going over a number of sheets.

Then I started to mark out the hull panels on the plywood. Duckflat have made some templates and I decided to use them as guides for a power router. The router is a very impatient tool - but used carefully I was able to produce side panels and deck panels for 3 PDRacers in an afternoon.

I tried first to cut the panels out completely with the router - but it was just too slow. So I ended up rough cutting the panels a little oversize and then running the router round the outside to produce the shape.

I actually think it would be pretty possible to cut most of a PDR approximately to shape and attach the pieces of timber framing. Then use the timber framing as a guide for the router.

But in this case I made completed panels for three boats in an hour or so. The biggest advantage is all the panels are very close to identical. The picture rightshows the results of a couple of hours labour. About half the time was involved in working out the best way to do it.

I'll be up there again next week to do some more. I hope to get the boats to 3D stage next week before I head up to Sydney for Xmas. That means they can be registered.

This will double the current number of registered Australian PDRs to 6 and bring the worldwide number to 123!!!

More pics and details here.

Michael