Off the grid
Murray makes a sailboat from bits during lockdown
NOT CONTENT WITH THE CHALLENGE OF SURVIVING FOUR WEEKS IN LOCKDOWN WITH SEVEN PEOPLE, MURRAY TESTS HIS RESOURCEFULNESS WITH ANOTHER PROJECT
An off-grid lifestyle tends to be somewhat insulated from outside change, so we approached the Covid-19 lockdown with little trepidation; we even hosted five extra people — we’re usually two.
A to-do list was pinned on the wall, and life changed gear just a little. We built a glasshouse — number four, or thereabouts — out of some old ranchsliders and did some running repairs. We pulled out the Thermettes to save on firewood and gas, and had a fastest-to-boil competition while we used them — Jennie won with 7min 17s. Turns out combustion is better if you start dry and add the water later.
Heading into the southern winter, we added our old 200W of solar to our visitors’ bus-top-mounted 1100W so they could continue homeschooling, and mounted and connected our brandnew 300W to the house so Jennie could work from home.
Now for some fun
It may be lockdown but you still gotta have fun — and a challenge. Sitting on the shelf was the bread-and-butterbuilt hull for a model yacht, formally known as the ‘1948 10-Rater Moth’. It had been left by an emigrating friend, along with the 1951 book from which he’d lifted the lines. The challenge would be to complete it during lockdown, using only on-site materials.
After a lot of sifting through trays marked ‘yachting’, ‘misc.’, and so on, I spread my collection of the most likely bits on the bench and set to work. Maybe I should have collected some patience over the years; certainly it was the thing in shortest supply!
The jib-stay mount called for a short piece of T-section brass, drilled for adjustment like Meccano. I fabricated two out of copper and then discarded them, before cannibalizing a couple of old brass cupboard locks. They weren’t quite mirror images, but in the spirit of lockdown they’d do.
Other brass fittings were also called for: chainplates, a mainsheet horse, jib track — ideally, everything at deck level. I chopped the chainplates — deckmounts for side rigging — out of busbar material from an old switchboard.
I can’t remember now where the four brass standoffs came from, but one became the horizontal jib track and the other three became keel bolts. The forestay deck fitting is from an old window opener and the backstay one is the end bracket from a roller blind. The horse nearly had me stumped, then, on my fifth pass of the resource library, I spotted a ballcock — ‘resource library’ is a great name for a stack of stuff under the trees. The brass arm was perfect, and a couple of old circular lock faces became the anchoring flanges.
Circular locks are a rare thing; my late dad once made a production run of central-locking inserts for retrofitting to houses, all designed to fit a 28mm hole. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind a couple being repurposed!
“The challenge would be to complete it during lockdown, using only on-site materials”
Choosing the rig
I turned to the hull, sealing the wood inside and out with a quick coat of Everdure and following that a coat of high-build two-pack. The deck beams were cut from western red cedar and set in slots routed in the hull.
I decided against the old-timer’s railway-track mast-base adjustment in favour of waterproof practicality: a piece of PVC pipe epoxied in place and extending above deck height. Good enough for muggins and sloppy enough to allow for rigging-induced mast-rake adjustment.
Fore and aft, cedar strips braced the
PVC pipe and provided a landing for the cabin / radio-control (RC) box. I jigsawed the deck from 2mm marine ply, glued blocks to its underside where deck fittings were to be bolted, and glued it down using a lot of cobbled-together weights — bricks, bottle jacks, a last …
Those yesteryear fellows raced these boats with three complete rigs for varying wind strengths. I went for the number-two rig dimensions as a compromise; one mast is quite enough! That called for something 73 inches (1.85m) long. The old-timers built them hollow and in timber but I didn’t have the patience for that. A friend suggested using a fishing rod, and that worked for the bottom half; the top is an old ski pole.
The innovation goes on. The masthead fitting is filed from aluminium T-section, the hounds raided from dinghy hardware. The boom is an old pup-tent pole, and the jib boom started life as a hang-glider batten. The ‘gooseneck’ — the pivot at the forward end of the boom — is a mountain-bike seat clamp; the ‘outhaul’ — the slide at the back of the boom — is curtain track with a hand-filed traveller. The rudder tube is also hangglider batten, with the shaft formed from a 6mm stainless-steel drinking straw, and the rudder itself is stainless sheet wrapped around the shaft.
It pays to have a plan B
The keel, of course, had to be cast in lead, using the wooden original as a male plug. I’d done twopiece moulding before for full-size catamaran centreboards, using plaster
“The brass arm was perfect, and a couple of old circular lock faces became the anchoring flanges”
of Paris, but the only thing available this time was some old, premixed Polyfilla. It needed to be soaked so much to become malleable that it took forever to dry, and then it shrank too much in the drying. I broke it up and went for plan B; it so happened that one of our lockdown guests is a dab hand with clay.
The process is to sink the plug halfway into the clay, let that go hard, wax the remaining piece of plug and the clay face, then pour more clay over as the second half of the mould. Both parts have to be robust enough to be split, have the plug removed, have pouring and venting holes carved out, be clamped together again with the keel bolts sandwiched, then have lead poured into the cavity. At time of writing, the second clay pour has just been done.
As of the end of the four-week lockdown — and the deadline for this article — KZ Lockdown isn’t finished.
The RC is in transit, the keel is yet to be poured, and there’s a bit more painting and rigging to go. I might cheat and ask a friend to sew the sails — although the cutting and material are mine, thus qualifying as ‘on-site’ and ‘during’.
I could have sweated over a replica of the old-timer’s automatic sailingcontrol mechanism — called ‘Braine
A friend suggested “using a fishing rod, and that worked for the bottom half; the top is an old ski pole”
gear’ after its inventor — but RC is a lot more practical.
KZ Lockdown isn’t a perfect vintage replica, nor will she foot it with a modern 10-Rater — any more than a 1948 racing yacht can foot it with a modern one. However, she will pass the ‘class’ test with flying colours and what she lacks in finesse she makes up for in backstory and patina.
It’s been a ton of fun thus far, and promises a lot more to come. For someone who rates sailing in the top two, it’s been a good way of keeping frustration at bay.