Keel Odyssey

So I have not posted in a long time for a couple of reasons:

The first reason is that I have spent all of my building time struggling with my keel. As Tim describes it, it is a love -hate relationship. Actually it is more a love type relationship and I just decided to spend as much time as necessary to finish it. And that implies a whole lot of work and very few interesting pictures.

The second one is that weekend time dedicated to building has been reduced with the good weather and winds here in Istanbul. Today (Sunday) was again a good example: about 18knots of wind, waves... Just to good to stay locked in my garage....so I spent my afternoon kitesurfing and had a blast. Feels great after a long lasting winter.

Back to the keel, to try to keep a fair profile while shaping the keel I cut out 4 templates out of plywood leftovers and went to work:

one template for the leading edge, one for the trailing edge, and two for the foil chord.

I constantly refered to the templates. They became my more important allied in checking the profile fairness throughout the keel shaping saga.

The rest is an endless story of shaping, sanding, and fairing....

I started out with a planner, switch to an orbital sander and after much sweat, went to the grinder ! I could not find any other way to shape that red oak monster without using the grinder. Just to much material to remove and I could not figure out how to use my hand planner correctly. So after a while I had a somehow decent shape but definitely not worth a picture. Angle grinder does eat material away but is certainly not a precision tool for shaping a keel. So mine was left with a lot of ups and downs which I sanded out with a longboard and very long hours of dedicated work.

Once I got as close as possible to the desire profile, I started fairing.

I though initially that i would not have too much work fairing...My mistake.....But I am glad I used West fairing filler. It sands out great and is really pleasurable to work with. So I just faired, sanded, checked templates, faired some more, sanded some more, checked templates, faired again, sanded again, and on and on until I was satisfied with the end result.

And yes, as you can see in the picture I was left with a lot of fairing material on the initial shape. But it is now pretty smooth an uniform.

I guess it could be better (that is my perfectionist side taking over !) but I think I ll go ahead with what I have .

Here is a section of the keel. The Naca profile looks allright. I cutted both ends of my keel blank because it was purposely longer that final keel measurements. That gave me a good exit area for my tools. It also gave me the chunk of profile I will need to leave the keel space when molding the bulb.

So for the next days I will build the simple rig necessary to laminate the keel. I will do what Tim Ford has done which is basically the method described in one of the tutorials of the Swift Solo.

Than will come the keel sleeve which is another story...

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