It's getting real ....

I'm a fan of less work, more progress as long as the budget is kept in line. To that end I had Phil & Dave of Phil's Foils / Competition Composites use their CNC table to cut the panels of the boat from the 3mm luan plywood we chose as the skin material. Eric took the 12 plywood sheets (6 for my son Thomas, 6 for Robert's daughter's boat) out to their shop on Tuesday. Picked up the cut panels on Thursday - talk about service!

Phil & Dave charged us $20/panel ($120/boat) to do the cutting. If I did the work myself (and I certainly could have) I would have spent way more time and would have had to loft the drawings out in full size before even marking up the material to cut. At my hourly billing rate for work, doing this job myself would have cost more than the boat should total in cost. As it is, Eric sent the CAD files direct to Phil, panelized and ready to go. Because Eric wanted to keep all panels within a 4x8 sheet size, most of the longer panels were laid out diagonally - so the cut density was very low. Waste material was over 50% of the six sheets, but at $13.95 per sheet, so what. We didn't want to have to scarf the plywood to get the boat built. Scarfing would have taken build complexity out of range and also would have made epoxy a necessity.

I'm sitting in my office looking at a stack of cut panels.

I've got to go buy a bunch of dressed pine 3/4 inch boards to make the stringers and support stuff from, as well as the board blanks for the foils. The only "complex" tool/job in the build is using a table saw to angle cut the outside edge chine logs. The angle of the chine logs basically drives assembly. Outside of the chine logs, about everything else can be done using very basic tools.