What's the current goal?

Well, making a sailboat is no easy feat as I'm sure anyone here could assure you. Whilst it might seem easy at first glance, if you dig even a little bit below the surface you'll quickly come to realise what a complex mass of interconnected systems there are for the boat to even so much as function. So, as our first goal, we've been fabricating a boat for entry into the AberSailbot eXperimental Polystyrene Boats Competiton 2019.

In this competiton, each team will attempt to race a 1M polystyrene boat along a triangular course in Aberystwyth Harbour. We'll be scored on 4 categories - Functionality (does the boat... boat?), Build Quality (is the boat a... boat?), Process (does this webpage describe a... boat?) and Impressing the judges (do the judges like the... boat?).

We're given the base components, but the rest is up to us. We have to assemble, code, test, cry and modify the boat all the way to functionality.

So what have we done so far?

Since this blog has come into existance fairly late into the process, for this week's progress report, we'll just blast through a bullet point list of everything we've done in as close to chronological order as I can decipher.

• Before we got here, the hull was cut from a block of polystyrene.
• Reinforced the boat hull with fiberglass and epoxy resin
• Vacuum bagged the boat to ensure the fibreglass and epoxy sealed cleanly to the hull 
• Defomed the only hull we were given rendering all of our progress useless
• Panic!
• There was a backup prototype hull, we're saved! 
• Sanded down the new hull so it's finish is actually... finished
• Cut and sewed together the two halves of the main sail
• 3D modeled and printed out a bulb for the keel 
• 3D modeled reinforcement plate, fin and rudder
• Got the hollow shell of a website up and running