Monday, July 20, 2015

Ballast

It was time to decide what to do about the lead ballast situation. Part of me wanted to play it safe and conservative and go with 200 pounds of lead and 200 of cement. The other part of me wanted to throw caution to the wind and go a full 300 pounds of lead and 150 of cement.

I ultimately decided to take a risk a do the latter. Creating a stiffer and more stable boat had major appeal. Not having any CP 16 sailing experience didn't help me in making the decision. What did help me was knowing that I had a whole bunch of lead and a curiosity to see what lowering the center of buoyancy that much would do.


Three hundred pounds of lead is heavy! It took very few brain cells to decide that I should reinforce the keel area with more glass. I layered up a couple of sheets of heavy glass mat and epoxy. In the end I felt a lot more confident about dropping all of that lead in there.

Next was to figure out how to lay the lead in in a balanced way. After some reading and thinking I decided to favor the weight a bit forward. It was a good workout moving the stuff back and forth...like I said, lead is heavy.


I finally decided, pulled the trigger, and poured the cement...no going back now!!!


It's really great coming from a place of projects. My dad is a big tinkerer and always has a few project irons in the fire. Currently he is building a little barn in our backyard and lucky for me he was pouring concrete into Sonotubes and had all the equipment out that I needed. Nice.




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