11 / wand / footy / jig / machines

A little bit of news:

Took boat out on Friday. 11th sail. It was blowing 22+ knots all day. I put my 7sq chicken rig up, and baring one large sustained gust at 21kts the wind remained at around 16kts for the rest of my sail. So I was underpowered most of the time. I recorded the boats top speed so far – 14.7kts over 2 sec just pipping N4rkla’s 14.666 from April. N4rkla took some photos and video, but nothing worth posting.

I have been testing wand response and there is currently a weight at the end of my wand. I figure the inertia might filter out some of the wave responses. During this sail the bungy came loose and the wand was bouncing through its whole range of motion for each cycle of the chop. The boat was bouncing about all over the place. This was hilarious to watch and a rather interesting ride. I was surprised how quick the height can change. Strangely nothing broke despite these uuuge accelerations and the foil stayed in the water. Pulling the bungy back on stabilized everything again. It will be interesting to see where this spring(shockcord)-mass(wand)-dampener(friction) study will lead.

I put the deck on my footy last night. Holes all over the place. I need to drown it in Tarzan’s grip to seal them all up. Might get it sailing this weekend. I will do a full post on the footies later this week.

I have sold the SLINO jig to a bloke in Melbourne. It will be departing shortly. It will be cool to see another one on the water. N4rkla are currently collating our design revisions and will post them shortly. Hopefully before the construction starts on the next one. I will be making the plans and Rhino model freely available on this site (and the world one too if there is additional interest).

I did a site visit of a marine machine shop earlier this week. They have such cool toys. CNC lathes, 6 axis mills, forging capacity. I need to hurry up and finish designing my new foils, but I got so much work on. But to give you an idea of how busy I am, I am writing this at 5:30am with 3 instances of Rhino open each doing a high res render for 3 different clients!!!!11!1!