On Saturday, I went on into the shop and put the cutting table in place. A couple of hours later, I had the bottom and topsides all cut. Here they are with one of the bulkheads that I cut on Sunday.

If you can, I highly recommend a cutting table like we set up. In our case, we are using the saw table as a base, but you can use anything about 4 x 8 including a sheet of 3/4 plywood on a couple of saw horses. Then we took a sheet of 1/4 ply and glued a 1" and a 2" thick piece of cheap insulation foam to them.

Now, we simply lay the plywood on the table and cut away. The plywood is supported and is much easier to work with. You can even get on top of it to get up close and personal. The shop was clean before I started on Saturday, it really was.

The next picture is of the transom. We are going with twin rudders so we added the "wings" and corner drainage. This given us more support for the rudders.

The center tab is for the motor mount.

We also added some pitch to the cockpit floor. Not much, but as we closed up part of the transom, I felt we needed to improve drainage when the boat wasn't heeled very much.

We should get the rest of the bulkheads cut by mid week and then we get to give that stitching thing a try.

It is great to finally get to post actual progress on the i550.....there were times it didn't seem like we would ever get here. We also have a set of sails ordered. We went with Neil Pryde. Bob Pattison has been very helpful and is being supportive of our little project. The first set is all Dacron. Fat top main (163 SF), a 105% jib (83 SF) and a GP spinnaker ( 369 SF). As you can see, Bob is being very competitive and is working with us to get the rig and sails right. Give him a call at 203-375-2626 or EM at bp@neilprydesails.com. We went with Dacron for the first set for longevity and as developement sails.

Our rig, by the way, will be a double spreader, keel stepped Dwyer extrusion. It will be pretty close to the "as designed" Aluminum rig. We went with a lighter mast section (DM-4) as we 1) had it, 2) have used it on similar sized boats years ago and 3) as we are keel stepping it, we felt we could go lighter. If my rusty calculations are right, it will be just fine. If not....

Next post should have a picture of a boat like object!