This week I’m back aboard good old Spiffy, our 44ft hurricane-damage DIY catamaran, and I’m trying to wrap up what I’m hoping are the last experiments needed to DIY our massive 10mm bent acrylic windows. Yeah, I’ve been called insane for attempting this, but if we can pull it off it’s a really cool challenge—and it could save us around $15,000. I start out in the CNC shop with two goals: capture the exact curvature of our existing windows using a 3D scanner, and run a bigger oven test with larger plaster-of-Paris molds while logging temperatures with thermocouples. Once the 3D scanning spray finally shows up (praise be), I coat a cracked old window, slap on tracking dots, and scan it with my Einstar Vega. The point cloud and mesh look super promising, and I bring the scan into Fusion 360 to start turning real boat geometry into CAD that we can CNC into proper plugs and molds. In parallel, I cast bigger plaster molds, including one reinforced with 3% chopped fiberglass, and I dry them in the oven while watching the core temperature—because if there’s still water in the mold, it’ll stay cooler than ambient as it evaporates. The oven test goes way better than last week: the acrylic drapes nicely and the dreaded cold-spot dip is much less pronounced. We still see tiny surface imperfections from small bubbles in the mold, and the mold takes forever to heat, so next week I’m likely adding heating elements to the lid to get more even heat and faster forming. We’re close—really close.