iceboating.net Minnesota Ice Sailing Association

A week ago a few of us visited Dan Hearn here in Madison to talk about building the 4-Lakes Jr. Iceboating Program. While we were there we got to see Dan's building jig. He designed it to be flexible enough to loft and build both full-size DNs and the Opti-DNs (or ice-Optis, if you prefer):
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After seeing his setup Byron Tetzlaff and I decided it was the way to go for our building plans. We may be building slightly different sized boats (min/max length, different cockpit widths, maybe even an Opti), so the flexibility of Dan's setup of screw-down blocks seemed ideal. Our first version is built to sit on top of the already strong and flat Renegade jig in Jim's shop:
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Yesterday night we tried it out with the blanks for my sideboards. Everything worked fine. We played around with the width at the front of the cockpit (and discovered that my planned 12" inside width was too large):

We've even started lofting out the stern curves for min. and max. length hulls right on the table:

Dan numbers his angle-blocks and marks the location of each block on the table so he can place the blocks in exactly the same position (same screw holes) if he wants to repeat a particular boat shape. We're planning to do the same (once we figure out what we want to do!).

Cheers,

Geoff S.