You'll never believe this...

[iain_christie]

...but...






...wait for it...





...shock horror...






...WE'VE ACTUALLY STARTED THE BUILD!!!

[mathew_harris]

Cool, do we get to see pics as the build goes along?

[iain_christie]

Yep, not much happened so far apart from hacking the flares off but I will photogragh the whole build.

[Stuart Hopson]

   so the big question is.... will it be ready for the nats?

[iain_christie]

The big answer is...

...not a chance!

[Eggbert]

i sense a comunal sticky evening sometime this week! picture it now a large group of  people in masks and gloves closing in on all sides with angle grinders epoxy and carbon cloth in hand

[ross_burkin]

Wrong answer Iain! In the words or Jeremy Clarkson,
"How hard can it be?"

[iain_christie]

OK so we're half way through April and the event is in August, four months away.  I do work for a living, and the boat is 10 miles away, in Simon's garage, I can't just nip out and do a bit every evening.  The 12 is arriving on Friday and I've got a load of events planned in that this year with lots of sailing and practising as we go, as well as planning on finishing my house and getting it on the market and hopefully moving.  At the moment it is simply a shell as per the picture, and although I fully expect it to look something like a racked Cherub with a mast etc by that time, as anyone who has built one will know, it's that horrible bit at the end where you need to get what looks like a nearly finished boat to a boat that actually works which takes the time!

It's just not going to happen!  Suicide Blonde's conversion took longer than that!  I don't want to either do a rush job or spend every spare minute working on the thing...end of discussion!

[mathew_harris]

are you getting a separate 12 ian?  i thought you were going to race this one as both a cherub and 12?

[iain_christie]

Tom and I have been offered DesignSource for the year as the class is keen to start getting decent numbers of hopefully upright boats at the 12/18 events this year.  So I'm picking it up on Friday, practising this weekend and then racing at Rutland the following weekend, and there are a number of other events this season which we'll be doing.

We'll need the practise, Tom and I have only been sailing the 18 recently in lighter breezes at Draycote (we're tend not to sail it if it's windy for a number of self imposed and club imposed reasons) and we'll suddenly be sailing a very twitchy 2 handed boat that weighs a fraction of what the 18 does and has a tendency to stand on it's nose!  Apart from a 2 minute blast on Simon's 12 where we broke the rudderstock before the first hoist, I have not sailed a 12 since Torquay last year!  It's going to be wet!

Anyway, fear not, we're cutting the bulkheads and laminating the spine and transom on the new Cherub tonight.

This is DesignSource by the way...

[Phil Alderson]

Four months is a bit tight, it took me three and a half to go from:



to sailing using most evenings and weekends. Also I had already built it once so new were everything went.

[iain_christie]

Well we laminated and vac bagged the spine last night so we've made a start!

[ross_burkin]

Everything was look pretty groovy at Simon Roberts's house the other night when we went to have a look (I went up to Draycote Tuesday evening to sail on Wednesday).