I didn’t admit it even to myself, but I was a bit nervous about this one. We’ve had so many welding deformation issues with the keel-box in the passed, so I wasn’t at all sure it would work. But it did. After a slight protest on the first attempt we greased it up with a bit of soap. And it went in with only it’s own weight. Now onwards! The bulb is next…
The story of the keel box is a little bit like Purple Rain by Prince. It’s always almost ending, but still goes on for ever…
But now we are in the final adjustments to make the fit into the hull perfect:
Today the keelbox will be done. So I guess next week we can finally put it in. Soooo many other jobs are waiting for this to get done…
The guy welding the inner side of the bottom plate has what I would think is the worlds lowest ceiling for a sauna. About 280mm. You can see in the picture that the bottom plate is really thick. This means that it needs to be preheated before welding, so the entire box that the welder is now lying inside is quite hot…
The WORKING keel-box, actually. Finally.
After all sorts of troubles, and after throwing away the first failed attempt, we now have a box that works. The keel goes up and down with a nice snug fit while only taking a about one or two hundred kilos to pull. This is less than it sounds, the lifting mechanism can overcome up to a ton of friction.
Just look at the kind of acrobatics that was needed for this work :-) !
The keel box, which has been a difficult nut to crack for the builders, is finally making progress:
The keel fin now passes through the box with a reasonably good fit. One corner of the box became too loose, but we will fix that by making the slider sheet on the fin 3mm thicker in that corner.
In case you wonder about the curved shape at the bottom of the box, this is the 25mm thick high strength plate that will take the main blow to the hull in case of running aground at speed.
