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!

Cool as ice...pfft

list of cool moth blogs that is much more accurate than any worlds form guide!

Thanks for the plug, but if you knew the real markla, cool would not be a word associated with him. His penchant for moths and heavy metal pale into insignificance compared to his uncool footy building skills and left handed-ness. Narkla on the other-hand is fuckin’ Fonzi cool! Just ask him…ayyyy!

It is true, after one too many days waiting for the wind to fill markl4 challenged me to a footy building duel, something to muck around with until it's worth heading out on the moth. Needless to say the building part is progressing slowly with the styrene sheet plate hulls finally watertight and keels being built now. One design swing rigs will be built next (with thanks to markl4's sorkplace for supplying mylar printing, little do they know), but we'll do these together because there is a knack to it (I'm a model yachty from long ago, including internet debates with DL about 12 years ago!!! maybe I shouldn't admit to that after being rated the coolest bloog...it's in the past now). Next hull build though, I'm not sure markla should heat cure the hull joins in the oven...styrene is a thermoplastic. Photo of the Fonz footy below, I can't find photos of your Elephant Man m4rkla.


On the IKEA moth front, we're in the process of updating the flat pack to incorporate lessons learnt and cool ideas, discussion to follow...

Disclaimer - N4rkla doesn't have nearly as cool (or thick) hair as The Fonz or womanise quite as much (if only I could)...

Before...
After...


Speaking of cool, how awesome is Alinghi 5! Can't wait to see video of it sailing. The yanks will have their work cutout to beat one of the fastest big multihull teams around. I "did" like the look of DoGzilla and thought it would be a contender, but with its latest mods and A5 now to compare against, it just doesn't do it for me anymore. I hope Larry doesn't take it back to the courtroom, settle it on the water.