Hey, will you pay me to pedal the canal?

Well, I realised I'd not blogged anything for a while, and why not? To be
honest it's because not a lot has changed, but why should that stop me?

I'm now at the stage of having planned everything, designed most things and
now the actual doing starts. This is my to do list:

Decide, finally on the charity.
Publise the event.
Build the boat.
Transport the boat.
Pedal the boat.

So not that much really. But before I do any of this I need to find some
money. And, that's where I fall down, because I get shy about asking for
money to pay for my enjoyment. I know deep down that it's not really
begging, that it's fundraising. I can justify it because if I didn't ask for
a little cash to pay for things, then I wouldn't be able to raise a lot more
cash for charity. But, there's still a little bit of me which says "you're a
cheeky sod, why should people give you money?"

I'm sure I'm not the only person who'll ask this either, but I jsut have to
keep saying to myself, if I don't do it then the moeny doesn't get raised.

So fundraising is the focus. At least I'm not trying to raise thousands, I
think I've planned almost all the money out of this boat, and got it as
cheap as it can be, and i think it's a good return on anyone's investment
too, because it's such an od thing to do, so people look, and when they look
they see the sponsors. Hey, it's a pedal powered floating billboard, and
damn cheap at that.

So, mister, give us some cash.

Deadlines

Part two of my thinking is when, when will I do this? Now hopefully this
year will be like all the rest and summer won't really kick in till
September, and the good weather will carry through, so I don't see that as a
deadline. But, I've discovered that there's a big festival of the canal in
Nantes the first week of September, and what better way to finish a journey
than with a festival? Of course that means that the start date would be the
middle of August - seven weeks away! Can I get it all done in seven weeks?
Would I be better changing everything round an starting in Nantes? I don't
know, it all depends on the answers to the questions in the last blog.

Watch this space.

Bend me, shape me, anyway you want me

I've had my song in my head all night, and it certainly seems appropriate as
I'm thinking about the hull construction. Again it's a tale of options, and
going through the pros and cons of each one.

I started with "tortured PVC" the idea being to take large 2m x 1m sheets of
PVC and bend them over a skeleton then fill the whole lot with expanding
foam. I moved away from that to the foam sandwich idea.

The foam sandwich would be 40mm sheets of expanded foam each cut to follow
one of the contours of the boat. Then they're all laid one on top of each
other and given the final shaping. Once the hull shape is there the whole
lot is covered in fibreglass and epoxy. But then yesterday I discovered a
new method.

This one involves building an "external framework" which matches the ull
shape.Then, thin, rollable expanded foam is laid inside this and glassfibre
and epoxy applied. Once it's all dried you pop it out of the framework and
glassfibre the outside. The idea is that each half hull can be built in the
same framework, simply by flipping the framework round.

So which one to do? I'd discounted the tortured PVC as the curves began to
get a bit complex and I found that PVC sheets were smaller than I thought,
but then I discovered that the expanded foam is much more expensive than I
though, it also involves huge amounts of cutting and sanding and there's the
problem of mounting the pedal and seat frameworks. The external framework
looks interesting, the foam's readily available, but I'm worried about how I
could keep the hull form in place during the build up.

So I'm wondering again about tortured PVC. First of all I've found that I
can get PVC in bigger sheets than I thought and have read more about
thermoforming, secondly I like the idea of the finished hull being in large
sheets, somehow to me it seeems more abrasion resistant, thirdly the egoist
in me likes the idea of using a method I'd though of myself, and finally
I've realised that the curves, whilst more complex are also larger than I'd
been thinking of.

So yet another change, and for now I'm going to look more at the PVC method,
but with a twist. I'll still have the internal framework, but I'm thinking
that combining that with parts of the external frame male mold, to help the
thermoforming process.

Watch this space, as they say.