After a (rather too long) hiatus from building the Starwind 860, we're back at it with the plywood webs of the aft crossbeams. (A similar set for the front crossbeams will be built once this pair are complete.)

The trimaran's folding crossbeams are a fairly conventional box section structure, with plywood webs fore and aft joining thicker top and bottom flanges of laminated wood strips.

Step one is to loft the shape of each piece onto the plywood, point by point, then join up the dots.

This is something that would be done with a CNC cutter if we had a full shop- but we don't, so we're sticking with the old-fashioned way: two tape measures, a pencil and a straightedge.

Out come the circular saw and the jig saw, and we'll cut them out. This is very much a two-person job, taking only a few fairly easy hours with both of us (but quite tricky if I were to attempt it by myself).

Each of the four webs (fore and aft faces of the aft port and aft starboard beams) has two layers, the inner of which is cut away to provide a tie-in point- and an alignment reference- for the blocks to which the struts will attach.

We now have our first real glimpse of the size of this thing. Her overall beam, at 4.66 metres, would fill a two-car garage.

Small by some standards, perhaps, but she'll be a monster relative to most of the boats we encounter up north.