February 2003

On the last Saturday in January I headed off to Henley to visit Henwood & Dean. Colin had two Slipper launches in for re-fit, one 25' and the other 35'. A great opportunity to take some lines and photographs. For me the 25' launch has the best proportions. After 3 hours of much talking and some measuring I had the basic proportions of a genuine Andrews slipper launch before heading into Henley for a spot of lunch.

Click to download designs Using this information I've created two designs. 'A' which is as close to the genuine article as I can be without a full survey and 'M' is a more practical keel shape which will be easier to form in ply around the stem area. I've included an approximation of the Selway design 'S' for comparison. 'S' is 67" beam and the 'M' is 64", where 60" would maintain the beam to length ratio of the measured 25' Andrews launch.
The small black circle denotes the center of buoyancy. One of the drawback's with 'A' is it's forward position relative to the cockpit. Whilst 'M' is a little better in this respect 'S' has this placed mid cockpit, excellent with a full crew, but that's because the cockpit is so far forward. All considered 'M' is the one I'm going to build.

shed windows The workshop has progressed a little. It now has glazed window frames courtesy of Mike and I've started the porch and deck area.
Ground auger This was the first time I'd used a ground auger, what a great piece of kit.

This month saw the start of the conversion of this site to CSS (cascading style sheets). So far it performs as per the tin, with one or two workarounds. Although the conversion to xhtml, allowing that fixed menu in the left-hand margin, has been more challenging than it should. It takes no prisoners. For creating style sheets TopStyle is excellent and for checking CSS and html I've found CSE html Validator very useful.