January, 2013

Obtaining the Hazardous Zero-9 Merlin Rocket Plans

The Hazardous Zero-9 Merlin Rocket plans and the required license to build one or more sailboats can be purchased directly from designer Keith Callaghan's website.

Complete sets of plans for any of the Hazardous series Merlin Rocket dinghies are available in electronic and paper formats. Electronic formats are available in AutoCad and/or PDF files. Full size drawings are available to make patterns and cut the parts. Additionally, CNC files are available for the hull and the building frames.

Buying Marine Plywood and CNC Services

I purchased the electronic plans and license from Keith Callaghan. Miller Blueprint printed the full size paper drawings. I hired the CNC services of Fine Lumber & Plywood to cut out the parts from 4mm and 6mm Okoume and 12mm Meranti marine plywood, which they supplied. They also cut the building frames from 1/2" HDF. Brian Tinnerman is the CNC Operations Manager at FL&P and I am very pleased with the accuracy and overall quality of their work. While I could cut the pieces using the templates in the full size drawings, there is an element of time savings and precision that CNC services provide. It was worth it.

There is an option to fully cut the parts or leaving them with a few small tabs on the 4 x 8 sheet of plywood. I selected the former since I picked up my order locally. I also took home all of the usable leftover plywood, which has proven to be very useful for cutting several small parts. 

Once at my shop, I was able to store the parts in a safe place and stage the parts later for inspection against the full size drawings.

Getting the Merlin Rocket Construction Underway

Given my limited space, I figured out quickly that setting up the building frames at this point would take away valuable space to build the centerboard case, scarfing the planks, rounding up edges and applying epoxy resin to the parts before planking begins. So after careful consideration, I decided to start with the centerboard case.