A Didi Mini Goes Cruising

The first boat to our Didi Mini design, drawn to the Mini 650 Rule, was built by CKD Boats of Cape Town for owner Mike ONeill. She was named "Warlock" and never raced in anger. Mike is a superyacht captain and seldom in the same location as his little boat. Eventually he sold her and the new owner commissioned Fluid Yachts, based in the gorgeous town of Knysna, to transform her into a little fast cruiser. The photos below show "Warlock" in her original form and the transformed "iCandy".

Changes include a reworked interior with as many comforts as could be fitted into such a small hull, extension of the deck to the transom, swept-spreader rig for easier handling and a retro-fitted lifting keel to replace the 2m deep fixed keel.

"Warlock" with 2m fixed keel

"Warlock" had the old style Mk1 aft deck.

"iCandy" with lifting keel to access shallower anchorages.

"iCandy" with extended aft deck for a bigger cockpit.

"iCandy" with tall swept-spreader rig for easier control.

"iCandy" now has a retro-fitted aluminium lifting keel.

Keel-lifting tackle of "iCandy".

Looking aft from the massive forward double berth into the saloon.

The new lifting keel of "iCandy" is to our design and can be retro-fitted to any of the Didi Mini or Didi Cruise-Mini series designs. Keel-down draft is 2m, the same as the fixed keel, but it can lift to reduce draft to 1m, for access to shallow moorings or anchorages.

For more about our Didi Mini design series or our other designs, please visit our main website at http://dixdesign.com/ .

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Didi Cruise Mini available in UK

The Sail 4 Cancer charity in UK has a Didi Cruise-Mini that has been donated to their cause and is available for sale. This is a cruising version of the Didi Mini Mk2, with a lifting keel and reduced rig, as well as more headroom. It is a small performance cruiser in the image of the Mini 650 trans-Atlantic racers.

Didi Cruise-Mini, a sleek little performance cruiser.

I sailed one of these boats recently on Puget Sound when I was there for the Wooden Boat Festival. She proved to be a speedy little cruiser with delightful manners. She handled beautifully, carries her rig very well and has comfortable accommodation for weekending or short holidays afloat. We sailed past everything under sail that we saw on the water, sailing higher and faster. This was despite towing a clinker dinghy that was almost as long as she was. We had no desire to tow the dinghy but it was also destined for the Wooden Boat Festival and dragging along behind us was the simplest way to get there.

Twin rudders and lifting keel give access to shallow anchorages.

This boat that is available is in the Hamble yard of Boatshed, in the charge of Peter Delbridge. Anyone interested in it can contact Peter at the email address (peter at boatshedhamble dot com). It was built as a rehabilitation project by a man who was recovering from a serious illness. He completed the boat, sailed it once then donated it to Sail 4 Cancer when he moved abroad and could not take the boat with him.

Lifting bulb keel, excellent stability with shallow draught.

It is a complete boat, with all hardware and sails, ready for coastal cruising. The lifting bulb keel and twin rudders will get her into shallow anchorages that are inaccessible to larger or deeper-draught boats.

Swept spreader rig for easy handling, less complication than a Mini 650 rig.

100% of the selling price will be donated to Sail 4 Cancer (less yard fees etc), a UK charity that provides water based respite services for families affected by cancer. This is an excellent opportunity to buy a boat at a very affordable price and benefit a worthwhile charity at the same time.

Efficient cockpit with cuddy for shelter when on watch.

She is priced to sell, at £6,000 and well worth a look to see if she may suit you.

To see more of this and our other designs, visit http://dixdesign.com/.

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Didi Mini Mk3 in Vancouver BC

Mark Paterson lives in Burnaby, British Columbia, in Canada. In 2010 he was one of the first customers to buy plans for the Didi Mini Mk3. His boat is nearing completion and he expects to launch before the end of this year.

I met Mark in 2011 when I was a speaker at the Metal Boat Festival in Anacortes, WA. He drove down from Canada to meet, a pleasant surprise for me seeing as he was building a plywood boat and I was there to discuss steel and aluminium boats with people who work with cold and hard materials, grinders and sand-blasters.

A few weeks ago, when I was a presenter at the Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend, WA, Mark came down again. He caught up with me at the Didi Cruise-Mini that was being exhibited by David Blessing. Mark gave me a flash drive loaded with photos of his project, from start through to the present nearly complete stage. I will post photos of his project over the next few weeks.

Marks Didi Mini Mk 3 with hardware going on.

 Mark has done some exquisite work while building his boat, work of which any builder would be rightfully proud. Some of it is above the level of expertise that I would expect from an amateur builder and is to his own detailing, modified from my drawings and made from carbon/epoxy instead of aluminium or stainless steel. The lighter weight of these items will go some way to offset the comfortable interior that he has put into his boat. I can see the influence of a wife in the interior.

Nice galley to cook up a storm in a little boat.

I wont show the early construction photos. The construction method is much like her bigger sister, the Didi 950 that is shown in posts on this blog over the past few months and I dont want to bore you with repeated info. You can access the Didi 950 posts through the archive list at left. Instead I will focus on the more interesting aspects of Marks build. Watch for those posts over the next few weeks.

To see more of this design and others in our portfolio, please visit http://dixdesign.com/

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Motor Well A Mini Project Unto Itself

Oh, the motor well.  Seems simple enough.  Build a box that bolts to the back of the boat, upon which the motor clamps.

Ive been working on the motor well since the days of the Troublesome Skegs and before the Boat Flip.

Turns out that though this earns only a brief paragraph in the Glen-L Waterlodge instructions, it is really quite time consuming.

And though the motor well shows up on various views in the plans three times, it still leaves a lot of unspecified dimensions. Despite a lot of fancy maths including tangents and the Pythagorean theorem my first effort to suss out the missing dimensions and angles was a loose collection of mismatched angles and incorrectly cut two-by stock.

The challenge of the motor well is that there are few right angles, several that are very close, but not quite 90 degrees, several similar obtuse angles and some crazy acute angles. The difficulty lies in translating perfectly good angles and lengths to actual measurements and cuts.

My second attempt -- salvaging as much of the previously cut wood as I could -- discarded the mathematical approach and did it the way a carpenter would. Rather than cutting the two-by stock first, I marked out the known angles and measurements on plywood, solving the unknowns as I went along.  I cut out the 5/8" plywood giving me a useful template that would be used for the sides of the motor well.  Finally, I measured and marked the two-by members to match the template. Magic!

After fitting everything best I could, I epoxied everything together to give me two assembled sides to the motor well.

This was a logistical challenge similar to assembling the side stringers -- you want to align the two-by members facing up, but the screws need to go in from the other side.  In this case, the motor well sides were small enough I could assemble the two-by members facing up on saw horses, then put a few screws in from the bottom to hold them together.

After that, I flipped them over and screwed the shit out of them.  All done while everything -- drill, screws, wood, hands -- are covered in sticky goo. Fun!

I completely encapsulated the wood inside the motor well with epoxy to protect it from decay.

I know from experience assembling boxes, it is easy to discover in the end that youve created a parallelogram that doesnt fit your last side.  How to prevent this?

I temporarily screwed the bottom on the motor well to square up the sides before assembling the rest of the box.  Im using wax paper to prevent the epoxy from accidentally adhering the bottom.  In fact, the bottom wont go on until after the motor well is already bolted on to the hull to allow me access to the bolts.

Now, I can go ahead and epoxy and screw on the back and the framing members.

We have to bolt this thing in with 5/8 carriage bolts no greater than six inches apart.  Turns out thats a lot, really.

I marked the bolt holes and drilled from the outside of the motor well using a carpenters square to get holes perpendicular to the rake of the hull.

Sixteen bolts for this 2 foot square box hanging off the back of the boat.

The heads of some of the carriage bolts would fall on angled members, and so needed to be countersunk.

I needed to temporarily hang this thing so I can mark the bolt holes on the hull.  I built a little support jig that took into account the missing bottom piece.

Here is the motor well on the boat.  Fancy.

Using a wax china pencil, I marked the bolt holes for mounting the motor well.

It seemed like madness to drill 16 holes in my previously watertight boat hull.  Soon, well finish the outside of the motor well and bolt it on.

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Didi Mini Mk3 Kit from CKD Boats

I would have to dig deep in my files to find when CKD Boats first started cutting kits to our plywood designs. Owned by Roy McBride, this Cape Town company has the longest history of cutting our kits and has shipped kits for our plywood boats to many countries around the world. They also have the most experience with packaging large or small kits securely enough to arrive at their destination without damage or loss.

The most remote was a Didi 38 kit sent to Johnston Atoll in the North Pacific. It was a very comprehensive kit that included all plywood, complete rig, keel, engine, sterngear, galley equipment, deck hardware, pulpits, sails and even pre-cut window panels and all the cushions pre-upholstered. This was all packed into a standard 20ft container and had to be shipped via New Zealand and Hawaii, all expertly managed by Roy, his staff and his subcontractors.

CKD Boats has just completed cutting a kit for the Didi Mini Mk3 for a customer in France. It will be packed next week for shipping.

Didi Mini Mk3 sheet fresh from the CNC router.

The plywood components are held in place in the sheets by thin tabs that are left between the full-depth cuts. They are released from the sheets by cutting through the tabs with a box-cutter or jigsaw. This system keeps the plywood as full 8x4 sheets for easy packaging and protection of the components from loss or damage.

Didi Mini Mk3 hull skin panels with jigsaw joints.

The Didi Mini Mk3 is one of the first boats that I converted to jigsaw joints instead of the stepped scarph joints that we used previously. This results in easier assembly and is easier to cut, with less machine time involved. These two panels both show a narrow cut on one side and a wide cut on the other. The wide cut is at the junction between flat and radiused panels, so it has a half-depth rebate pre-cut full length of the panel for the structural joint of the radius panel to the flat sheet.

When this kit is out of the shop, the next will start cutting. This is for a Didi Sport 15 to fill an order from a South African builder.

To see these designs and others in our very broad range, please visit http://dixdesign.com/.

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