Boat building really is a big puzzle and only the designers and production people really know how everything is going to fit together. They have lived with it for about 18 months now, day and night. Once the assembly is done for the first time, the processes are written and the ongoing assembly of future hulls of the same design eventually works into a routine. I guess that's a good way to describe custom boatbuilding versus the semi-custom work that we do at Sabre. We do it over and again while custom builders do it just once and every boat is, for them, like our prototypes. Thanks to CAD technology first-offs and custom boats are not as hard as they once were but they still are very complex. Over the next ten weeks I 'll follow the process with you as the first Sabre 40 goes through it's metamorphosis from liquid resin in a barrel, boards and sheets of wood, coils of wire and hundreds of purchased parts, to become a beautiful living thing: A fine yacht.
Last week the glass shop infused the first deck. Decks are built upside down so that gravity is our friend and not our foe. Here you see that the two tone gelcoat has been sprayed on the mold and the stack of fiberglass and core have been laid in and stitchedd together. The tubes that will feed resin into the stack are in place. This image was taken about ten days ago. The resin infusion process took about 1.5 hours to do and the part sat overnight. It was then released and flipped into it's upright mode. I'll show you more of what's going on with the deck next week