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

Detailed Photos of PD Racer Assembly

I have put the full photo series from Rob Johnson building his OZ PD Racer up at Flickr.

I have also added comments to many of the photos. There is a lot of detail here to assist people building the Puddle Duck from our plans.

180 photos of building the PD Racer

This is what Rob posted after he looked through the series of him building the boat in 12 days last October.

MIK advised me tonight that he has got all of the photos together of me building PDR118 at the spring boatbuilding school put on by Duckflat Wooden boats at Hindmarsh Island.

Gee , it makes a clown like me look like I might even know what I'm doing !.
I guess its up to MIK if he makes it for general viewing , although I suspect you could get to it via his site.

If you do get to see it , look for the obvious cockup I , repeat I made , and later , you can see it corrected , no damage done .

I'll admit to being "all at sea" with this initially , I could only improve , and I did a bit , but if I can build a PDR , anyone can !.

You will note in the photos the "book" , it sure helped having such instruction available , and i'm sure MIK is improving it all of the time !.

I was steadily working away on what remains to be done , but we got a bushfire fright last night , so the boat is unfortunately on the "backburner" for now.
But congratulations MIK on putting this thing together (is it called a BLOG?) , its good !.

Rob J.

118th PD Racer is OZ

No Story about the DuckFlat Spring School is complete without a bit of a spiel about the first of the Mk2 OZ PDRacers being built. It was only one among the 12 different projects - but, hey, it is MY Design!!! (My other designs can be seen by clicking the links in the left column.)

It is the first one to be built to registration stage from the revised Mk2 Plan. The builder was Rob Johnson, a farmer from Victoria. That's him starting to put together the first bulkhead (panels acrosst the width of the boat that hold the sides apart. The next picture shows you what a bulkhead looks like when it is fitted between the two side panels. Everything is held together using a cordless reversible drill to drive in gyprock (drywall) screws. They don't need pilot holes and they pull out afterwards. Modern glued structures don't need nails or screws.

He has decided to make a big lifestyle change and move from the inland to the coast and wants a boat (or boats) to use. He was allocated the international hull #118 when we registered the boat at PDRacer.com

Rob told me he had some experience with building things in his youth, but freely admits that he had forgotten almost everything he'd ever known about using woodworking tools. Nonetheless he managed to build both the hull and the mast of the PD Racer in the 10 day class.

He took them home in the back and on the roof of his twin cab ute.

I was very happy with the way it all went together - quite a big improvement over the original two Mk1 boats I built earlier in the year. All that work calculating the true shapes of components and how they fit together seemed to have had positive results - there only needed to be a little bit of adjustment of one of the side tank faces - everything else just dropped in place.

Also the boat looks neater and stronger than the originals. Some of the changes to the boat (and the plans)

1/ to extend the sidetanks a little more forward to they hide part of the floor stiffener - makes the boat look tidier and more integrated

2/ Increase the angle of the side tanks from 12 to 18 degrees. This moves the face of the tank more into the middle of the boat where it can stiffen the bottom more effectively.

3/ Some changes to the mast making procedure to make it much faster - also to suggest that those who have routers should use them.

4/ A slight change to the hull rocker to reduce the sudden nose up attitude the boat takes when it starts to get onto the plane.

5/ The mast was beefed up slightly without increasing weight by much. One of the original Mk1 masts had broken and both were a bit bendy. By increasing their outer dimensions without increasing the wall thickness they are much stiffer (about 60%) with a weight increase of around 8%. Of course the sail had to be redesigned to match the new mast bend as they work as a unit.

All changes worked out well and have been incorporated in the plans.

The other thing that has been incorporated in the plans are some of the pictures of Rob building the boat. The sequence of building was changed between the Mk1 and Mk2 boats to make things much simpler and we didn't have photos for the plans that reflect the new method. Rob allowed us to fill in those gaps nicely - though you can see him grinning that sorta indicates that he would like the photographer (me) to stop taking pictures every 20 minutes!!!

Anyway, it all worked pretty well and the boat is nice and light and feels immensly stiff and strong.

By the way he has christened his boat "Overundersidewaysdown".

Thanks Rob!!!