Dart #5 on its trailer. Ready to be drug over to Betts’ to get its barrier coat painted on its bottom. As far as I can tell, this is the last of the Left Coast Darts.

Why?

I find that although we can develop a product, we have no ability whatsoever to market it. In other words, we just can’t heard sheep. Sadly, neither does anyone we know.  So, I took the first offer that came and sold off the Dart tooling. Anacortes Rigging bought them for a song and hauled it all off. I wished them well and washed my hands of the deal.

Here’s a quick rundown of the last build process. Dart #5.

Last time we screwed up the deck and had to chop it up. This caused some slow down. Actually we just stopped and went on to other things like developing quadcopters. Long story.

Here we have #5’s hull in the mold and ready to go.

Keel skins stashed in the corner, ready to go..

Trailer frame, ready..

FIrst order of business build a new deck.

Tim/Tom can do this in their sleep now. I’m barely involved at all anymore.

Tom looking for leaks in the vacuum bag.

Tim mixing resin.

Shooting the deck.

Deck’s all complete. Ready to pull and install.

Footrest mold being waxed.

Deck, out of the mold. Next is to flip it, trim everything and do final cleanup of the part.

Flipping..

Trimming..

Hardware going on..

Meanwhile, footrests getting molded.

Hull coming out of the mold.

Hull came right out. Nicely seasoned molds now.

Deck being fitted.

Final fitting of the bulkhead tops.

Glassing and blending the hull to deck seam.

Keel being assembled.

Keel back from being epoxy coated.

Assembled trailer with keel set in.

Dart #5 ready to mate with its keel on the trailer.

So, as we’re wrapping up Dart #5, I drove over and dropped off some of the last bits of tooling and took a farewell picture of what we spent so much of our lives developing.