NYYC | The RELIANCE Project

Denise delivered the third mate’s jersey, complete with all the details: hand embroidery of RELIANCE NYYC, ribbing at the collar, and ribbing at each sleeve end. Thank you very much!

Meanwhile, Bill, Herb, and Sandy have dry fit one of the deck edge toe rails into place so we can perfect our plans to complete attachment.

This toe rail assembly was actually an extension of the shell plating at roughly deck level to hold an angle iron piece with bull nose at the top. At the bow of the real RELIANCE, the nickel steel shell plate was 5/40″ thick, which lead to another of our “moments.” In our scale, that is 1/48″ thick!

Our RELIANCE model–with its deck the length of a J-24–had only 21 web-frames to which tobin bronze and nickel steel plates from about 1/48″ to about 5/128″ thick were attached. Imagine sailing your J-24 with that hull!

The toe rail really finishes off the deck, as you can see here:

(The bottom of the angle iron had been laid earlier as can be seen in the foreground)

There is a lot of effort going on behind the scenes to make sure our RELIANCE is accurate. Boats, especially race boats, change during the season. We chose late August as our configuration date, when RELIANCE was measured and raced for the Cup, since this timeframe is when we had the best pictures. Ours has been a constant battle for configuration management.

For example, NGH’s approved drawing 86-126 (from MIT Hart Collection) shows the original placement of three topmast backstay staples and a trysail staple as shown in picture #1 and as placed on our model as in picture #2. Our visit to the NYYC in NYC last Spring to see their model showed a discrepancy which was confirmed in picture #3 as blown up in #4.

Our metal casting expert, Mike Mirman, then used this picture to created a new fitting, shown in #5.