Foredeck male mold

After the bunks are fitted and finished on the dolly it will be time to build out the male mold for the foredeck. This is foam glued together to give it enough height and a few pieces tacked to the end for the nose to give it enough length. Next is to trace the rough shape on the big end and start to hot knife the foam away to get an approximate shape. A little fiberglass and bondo or maybe I can get away with just bondo to finish it off and it will be time to vacuum bag down a deck.

Moth dolly work

Time to finally fit the bunks to the dolly and be able to start work on the boat itself. The front bunk is going on with a delrin backing plate under the front end of the dolly and two sheet metal screws into the frame itself. The aft bunk will go on over two delrin spacers between the bunk and frame.

Powdercoated Opti dollies

For fun I had two of the Opti dollies powdercoated gloss black. They came out great and the pictures don't do them justice.

Production continues

The dollies come together with air hose as padding. Grips from McMaster-Carr, wheels from Harbor Freight ($6 each!) and caps from Caplugs.com. Thanks to Andy Carter for welding all of the dollies together and sending me to McMaster for the grips. Thanks to Ron Carter for getting all of the aluminum cut and filed with his excellent assortment of tools, for the Caplugs lead and where to source the aluminum. George from West Coast Sailing also recommended to go with the air hose instead of garden hose which was a great call. I think all I did was to source the wheels from Harbor Freight.

Optimist dolly production

As part of the Park City Sailing Association's growth we're developing a Junior program and we were in need of Optimist dollies for some kids' private boats as well as a few for the group. In total we're building nine of them and as I was already working on buying aluminum and parts for my moth dolly, I took on the task. Four were delivered to their private owners and today I finished up the three for the group and delivered them to the waterfront to be stored in a shipping container until Spring.