This is a screenshot of RebelCat 4 as I designed it in PageMaker 7. It's actually a digital pic of the monitor, hence the strange lines.

I had orginally designed the face to fit on a cone, because I had not yet discovered how to make the nose of the pontoons like a wedge, as modern cats and tris are. But when my experiments with 4-inch PVC were successful, I changed the face to fit the wedge.

Comparing my computer designed cat to the finished paint job, I think I came pretty close. The idea to make one pontoon female came as I began painting the first one, which became the male. The female has a shorter, red mouth, different colors (reversed) and a blue pupil instead of black.

The sails were also supposed to be painted, as shown, but several factors posponed that. First, I found some bright yellow sail material and could not resist buying all of it. It turned out that it was enough to make both sails. I then changed my computer image to reflect the color change, and it still looked good. However, I finished the boat just a day before I had to leave for a 'messabout' - a meeting of homemade-boat builders - at Lake Powell in the summer of '06, so the sails had to wait. I have yet to get back to that task.

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Living in a small cottage on a farm, I had plenty of room to spread out my boatbuilding operation.

Here, I'm sitting in the exact place where I plan to put the seat, about two feet over the water. This has two avantages over sitting on the hulls or pontoons: First, it increases the leverage of the crew's weight to keep the cat level on the water, as the wind pushes on the sails and tries to tip it leeward. It also gives a much less obstructed view ahead of the boat. The crew can easily see around the sails instead of having to look through them through little windows.

This is the first stages of making the foam form which will be placed inside the nose of the pontoon so that the PVC will have something to collapse around when it is heated and folded to make the wedge shape.

This pic shows one side, with a single rectangle of foam as the center. Each side of the form was then filled with foam and covered with cardboard until it took on the shape desired for the nose. Had I known how stiff it must be to resist the pressure of shaping the hot PVC over it, I would have made it even denser and more rigid.

Each pipe was cut back from the opening four feet on opposite sides. Now I know that three feet would have been fine.

The poontoon in the background has already been cut and the form is inside.

The completed form is jammed into the pipe against discs which have been precisely positioned inside.

The task now is to heat the entire front of the pipe until it's soft enough to fold around the form.

One of the many challenges faced during this procedure was keeping the form from moving inside the pipe once the PVC became soft and no longer held the form in place. That's right, and I didn't think about it either until the form began rotating. It must remain perpendicular to a line drawn between the cuts, otherwise the nose will not form properly around the form. This and all of the other problems will be covered in the video coming soon. It would be difficult to repeat this process from a description and a few photos.

A lot has appened since the last pic, but a friend and I were so busy with the heating, folding and crimping, there was no way to take a pic. However, I had two video cameras running from different angles to catch the event. A video of the whole process is coming, so stay tuned.

Briefly, the end three feet of pipe must be heated evenly, which means turning it like on a spit over a ceramic kiln where two large propane burners are blasting flame in our faces. It was so hot doing this, it gave new meaning to "slaving over a hot stove", hence no shirt.

The two by fours are attached by a hinge to form a crimper to seal the nose into a flat seam which was later glued, covered with a folded strip of hot PVC and glued again.

By repeatedly heating small sections of the overlapping and somewhat wrinkled PVC, it was possible to iron out most of the bumps.

The joint was then covered with thin, hot PVC and glued in place, feathered and sanded. The result was a wedge shape just like catamarans today, especially the larger ones.

I searched for several years on the Internet to locate a solution to shaping the PVC, rather than attaching cones as before, but I found nothing. I finally realized that I will have to pioneer this one for the rest of humanity, so I did countless experiments with paper tubes, then with 4-inch PVC pipe, until one day I figured it out. It is now possible to make respectable and quite hydrodynamic pontoons from PVC pipe of any size. Plans and a movie on DVD will be available soon. Stay tuned.

There were slight imperfections - bumps and dips - that I wanted to remove, even though they would not have been in the water. The 'curse' of the perfectionist, I admit. So I heated thin 'patches' of PVC to cover these areas and formed them over sand which I had used to fill the dips. After the patch cooled, I removed the sand and glued the patch in place. Here I'm sanding the edges of one such patch to blend it with the rest of the hull. Because the 'patching' process involved hot PVC, it was not possible to photograph it easily, but it was well-documented on video. I may have invented that technique also.

Notice the grey PVC strip which was heated and then folded and glued over the trimmed leading edge. I wanted a closed and solid nose, and this worked perfectly.

The mainsail is huge. I spread out a 10 by 20 foot tarp to work on (it wasn't long enough, so I added plywood at the top), and using a chalkline, snapped a grid with 12-inch squares so I always knew where I was. My computer printout had exact coordinates for each corner, batten, reefpoint and cringle, so I simply transferred them to the grid.

Okay, simply is not entirely correct. It was more complicated than that, but as the cat will not move without a sail, I was determined to make this sail.

What made it challenging was the material. It was probably polyester, but it was also quite limp, unlike the Dacron sailcloth I used for RebelCat2. This stuff moved all over the place, created wrinkles, stretched, and generally made my life, um, exciting.

The sewing had only begun when the two large sails were done. I now had a pile of trampolines to make, each one having up to three layers.

I burned up my mother's old Brother sewing machine (shown here) and switched to my other machine, a White heavy duty portable. Three days later I emerged from my little cabin with an armload of trampolines, enough to carpet my room.

The two pontoons are first positioned on spacers I have made for the purpose of assembly. I don't want the pontoons rolling off someplace, and I want them to sit at precisely the same distance apart as they will be when attached to the rest of the boat.

Here I'm setting the back spreader on. It gives rigidity to the back of the cat and also holds the rudder. The pontoons are held to the spreaders and deck frame with eight ratchet tiedowns.

Notice the shape of the pontoons at the nose. They are quite close to the shape of modern cats and tris, which slice through the water and waves with greater efficiency than a monohull, which has to push a lot of water out of the way.

Finally assembled for the first time on Lake Powell, UT, as part of a messabout of homemade boatbuilders. See duckworksmagazine.com for info on homemade boats.

So how did it sail? Like the wind! This cat is by far the fastest I have made, and sailing alone I was not able to sail it as efficiently as two. There are two sails to control at all times, the tiller (rudder) and the daggerboard. But I managed.

There are also two other controls for each sail. The mainsail has a traveller at the back to adjust the position of the boom relative to the centerline of the boat. The jib (foresail) has a similar control on the front spreader. The jibsheet blocks can be positioned at five spots on each side of the bowsprit, giving the crew better control over the angle of the jib in varrying wind conditions. It's also useful to steer the boat.