3 meter HDPE sailing dinghy

I always worried about low temp brittle but if you not go Antarctica or Siberia it should not bother you.

 

Few years back I did some work up north doing some edge of the artic through the ice winter crabbing. The sleds we pulled were made with hdpe runners laminated and bolted together. High was -14f low was -29f, with lots of weight on the sleds across pressure ridges and rough terrain. Not saying they wouldn't get brittle in cold, but I ran out of resilience before the hdpe did....

Have a lot of both hdpe and uhmw on my boats in various shapes sizes and thickness, on the rare hot day (we haven't had one of those in a few years) it does hold some impressive amount of heat. Stern of my last one had the setting ramp clad in it, we had a hot summer a few years back. Remember stepping on it barefoot while visiting with someone off my stern.... yowza it held some heat.

Guessing this dingy will be able to push up on a beach with no harm.

 

boat is almost done

 

She looks fantastic.

-Will

 

What kind of extruder you use ?

 

Interesting . Colour of the ramp was black ?
And the colour of this Darth Vader sailboat is black also ...

 

It will be interesting to hear how the dingy does in the direct sun. On one hand its dense and black, on the other it's going to have direct water contact compared to my guards so maybe the dense material will stay cool in the water.

Would be interested to hear how it does in the mid summer sun.


The router work turned out really nice on this one.

 

Kind of alien math . Cool.

 

Lake trials are done, the boat handles very well for a newbie like myself, there´s some minor tweaks to be done but i am really happy with the result.
The boat fits in my pickup truck and i can load and unload without any help, only some rope and a good old squat.
Now i have to finish all the sailing related parts, mast, boom, sail and rudder.
I have been watching a lot of Roger Barnes videos on youtube and picturing it as a cruising dinghy, fully equipped for adventures so there´s definitely a lot of gear to fabricate to come.

Pictures taken at Llanquihue lake, Chile.

 

It weighs 65kg, only the plastic.

 

I'm a bit curious about whether the thwart wound up that shape due to topological optimisation or was it just an artistic whim?

 

it´s called Voronoi pattern, i did it to reduce a little bit of weight and of course to make it look interesting.

 

Working on a design for the floor.
18mm plywood

 

Some progress on the rudder, boom and tiller.

 

Very cool! Keep posting if you have other images.