¡Ay, caramba!

I had a full day in the office planned today, writing a new system module to handle an emergency client situation duct-taped on to existing business systems in response to one of their customer's random demands. Sigh. I hate emergency response programming! It almost never works as well as cleanly designing things right from the start.

By late afternoon I was brain dead and couldn't write good code to save my life, so I started to play puzzle pieces with the CNC cut panels on my office floor. It's a 3-D Tetris game making a model out of flat panels especially when you can't stitch them together and you have to imagine the 3D result from a 2D flat layout.

I could not for the life of me make things work, and I take pride in the (hopefully) exceptional 3D spacial capability inside my melon. The hull bottom didn't match up to the transom width, and the cockpit floor was too narrow. For giggles I tried reversing their position and things suddenly started making more sense. What we thought was the two piece cockpit floor was actually the hull bottom, and the one piece panel that didn't fit on the hull was the floor.

This threw a monkey wrench into things. By placing the two piece bottom panels side by side and separating the two by .25 inches (router bit width at Phil's Foils), everything now lined up and made sense. I phoned out to Robert's place and was greeted by an anxious voice asking if I had started my build. I said no, I stopped dead when I noticed a problem. They had found out the exact same problem and had to reverse the build somewhat to correct for it. Nothing too serious, but I'm sure I would have learned new colorful French phrases to expand my emotional vocabulary had I been there! The French use a very un-English blend of religion in their profanity. What's even more interesting is that they modify religious words to be slightly different so it isn't technically a sacrilege, but the intended meaning gets through. Tabernouche! You have to admit, it's more interesting than using one word commencing with "F" over and over.

We have to recut the split hull bottom panel to make it one piece and all will be back on track. Not a huge deal. There are lots of little details in CAD file transfers that need person to person communication - just sending a file without a narrative is a recipe for this kind of problem. I don't hold anyone responsible at all - it is just one of those things that happen on a first prototype build. I'll have to go buy another 1/8 panel and trace out the corrected one piece panel on it myself.

While I was working today, Eliane, Robert & Eric made huge progress on her boat. They worked through the issue I describe here and have the basic hull half finished - in TWO DAYS of building. What remains is a little more stringer re-inforcement of the frames, insertion of the structural foam supports and then installation of the floor and cockpit side panels. Notice the inside of daggerboard trunk has been pre-painted during assembly. Photo courtesy of Robert (roblynn on Sailing Anarchy).

Dodged a few bullets there! Sometimes being on the trailing edge beats the bleeding edge!

I'm kind of relieved my puzzle play problems were justified and the 3D modeling problem I anticipated was real.