New low-cost "hardware store" racing class; input on proposed rules

I willingly concede you may be right here

 

there is also nothing that says the designs have to be amateur either, existing plans can be adapted using the lower cost materials (which may required some creative way to make them more durable), or any professional can design a boat for the class either, as long as he is willing to sell them for the price set by the rules.

 

The most recent and IMNSHO the best current development rule set is the International Canoe one.
http://www.intcanoe.org.uk/images/pdf/Forms/IC Rules 2009.pdf
Note that most of that document is concerned with the odd status of the IC as being under the administration of the International Canoe Federation: what you are actuall interested in is appendix 2, pages 17-26.
Another recent and potentially useful rule set to look at would be the UK Cherub one, http://www.uk-cherub.org/lib/exe/fetch.php/tech/uk_cherub_class_rules_2011.pdf, but their current rise of floor rule is not well adapted to preventing extreme shapes and mandates a chine. The Canoe restrictions are way better.
The thing to avoid with rise of floor rules is to measure the rise of floor at mid length, as is found in most older rule sets, since this has a distorting effect on the shape and also makes boats more difficult to build.

 

I think the low cost yacht for class racing is a great concept, and well overdue.

Without going over the huge number of old posts, has consideration been given to giving the cheapest boats a handicap benefit. ? having a maximum value is great, but maybe the challenge of going cheaper would promote real creativity.

Also, could we cater for the growing number of ... errr .. "well built" sailors ?, and ensure that the weights that the boats carry in a race, are made comparable.

I used to enjoy racing mirror dinghy's, but all the championships are won by 50 kilo 12 year olds, really unfair for 6 foot + enthusiasts.

 

Good rule; my apologies for missing it earlier.

 

Really? At least one recent national Aussie Mirror champ is comfortably over 75kg and probably now 51 years old, IIRC. Another top national Mirror sailor is a successful Laser racer in big rigs so he would be over 80kg and now around 55 years old, I think.

 

You're basically talking an inclination test as used on IOR and IMS boats. I lived on board at the same marina where they used to measure offshore boats and gave them the occasional hand shoving stuff around, as well as sailing on them. It was accepted as being pretty much the most troublesome and expensive part of those very complex measuring systems. Would be somewhat easier on a dinghy, but getting accuracy was much harder in reality than in theory.

I'm not sure what sort of fast unballasted boat has no hiking straps, but to be honest it sounds as if you haven't sailed any of the most popular classes around (FS excepted). I have never heard of someone getting tangled in a hiking strap and my research includes things like going through rows of sailing mags at the national maritime museum, etc.

Hiking "benches" are arguably more problematic in that they can cause a boat to invert quickly.

 

If you look at the continuing direction of the comments you might conclude that the "creativity" goal of the original proposal is falling by the way side.

Just look at the current focus on eliminating skinny boats. This of course naturally arises from the assumption that multihulls should not be included, skinny hulls are faster, but done to the extreme in a monohull will produce "extreme" boats - International canoe as an example.

Do you mean creativity in widgets, or finding cheap materials, or over all boats?

I personally assumed the overall boat design. To me it is very clear that most do not want this goal.

 

The trouble is we have 200 hundred years of sailing competition history. We know how to win a design competition: we've just had one in Spain, and its won by the longest, thinnest, biggest sailed catamaran that a billionaire can get sufficiently talented boatbuilders to build and sailors to sail. And when its done no-one really wants to do it again.

So actually all the design interest comes from the restrictions. And the "must be capable of being built for less than xxx from this list of materials" is an interesting restriction. But most of all, you know what's the most important attribute of a boat? I suggest is that people should want to get up in the morning and go sailing in her. And so you probably want to put in a few more limits so that the specification is something other than the longest skinniest boat that a sufficiently talented builder can get to stay together with a sufficiently talented sailor in the boat, because that tends to limit the number of participants.

 

If the object of the competition is to produce a cheap,easily built,reasonably fast design,stable enough that you dont have to be an olympic athlete or a professional sailor to keep it upright,it seems to me a well designed scow would be the perfect --something similar to the fireball,only slightly less overcanvassed and more beamy(so trapeezing wouldnt be necessary).It would still give a nice,fast ride,but be sailable by folks with a wide range of agility.Ive been working on some preliminary designs,and if not prohibited by some unfortunate addition to the final rules intend to make that my entry.

 

Oh when will they build a fashionable boat for the plus sized sailor!

Seriously, how would you handicap major size and weight differences in very small boats?

 

IMHO
Scows are super simple hulls that require big difficult sails or big wind to perform. If the wind is light, you lose.

 

That is because, as gggGuest says, we know what will happen. There is little ingenuity or creativity needed; design a boat with maximum beam for hiking power and minimum waterline beam and then get experts to train hard until they can keep it upright long enough to win most races.

This has been the pattern in Canoes, Moths, H Jolle, R Class, 18 Foot SKiffs, 12 Foot Skiffs, International 14s, Merlins, N12s, NS14s, MG14s, Swedish canoes, etc etc etc. The people who created these boats are smart and came from times and places where there was an enormous amount of shared interest, knowledge and experience in development dinghy design. When I was a kid in my state alone there was something like 700 dinghies and skiffs active in development classes. People would sit around after races and talk design against the background of the lore earned by hundreds of sailors and probably a couple of dozen active designers in my home city alone. We cannot assume that they are all complete ****** who lacked ingenuity.

This class will lack that sort of background. That's not to attack this class - it's a cool idea and more attention to low-cost development classes is a great thing and could perhaps have kept the development scene alive - but it is a fact that even towering geniuses don't work in a vacuum, as both Einstein and Newton pointed out. It is highly unlikely that this class will benefit from some creative explosion that will make obsolete all the knowledge earned by the many thousands of previous development class boats, and that knowledge indicates that the laws of physics will dictate that the fastest boat without restrictions is not the sort of thing that will fit the other aims of the class.

The development class sailors of the world have shown enormous ingenuity over the years but it has almost all gone unrecorded unless you start sifting through old mags (mostly not from the US, which has had great innovations in sailing but not such a big development class scene in dinghies) and websites. There have been boats designed to sail under the water, boats that foil over the water, 18 foot long boats with 30' wingspan and 44' masts, cat schooners, solid wing masts from the '30s onwards, swivelling/tilting/sliding/flipping/racking/trapping/etc to move ballast, tunnel hulls, mono bows mated with cat sterns, cat sterns mated with mono bows, boats pointed at each end or square at each end, boats with brakes and bipods and banana-bend masts and batwing sails..... a vast amount of creativity has already been shown and the current state of the art is the product of that ingenuity, not the product of ignoring that ingenuity. And part of that ingenuity has been to realise that classes without rules don't work.

 

Great point. Scows offer a great mix of performance and stability; witness the later scow International Moths. The problem is that scows also get wiped off the planet most of the time by a skinnier hull that cannot be sailed by folks with a wider range of ability unless there are restrictions; restrictions which would normally do more to protect scows from extinction than prohibit them.

Have you checked out the '80s scow designs on the Aus Moth site? That includes world champ designs that evolved out of the dozens of designers working on scows over about 50 years, and it evolved some excellent boats. There's a huge amount of knowledge encapsulated in those lines.

Those scows were not super-simple, because they were the product of development over hundreds of boats aimed at winning titles. The shaping was subtle in some ways but it worked well; for example the later scows went to narrower sterns and did a great deal to solve the nosediving issue.

 

I've sailed a 'Super Snark(r)' and a scow I built myself. The scow, being probably the worse built boat that ever successfully sailed, planed readily, and I would say did at least ten knots, once it got going. The 'Super Snark' went about that fast, when I sailed it in 30 kt winds. The aluminum tiller bent in my hands and the boat produced a rooster tail. This was mostly down wind. Having to get back home, I had to slowly tack, feathering the un reef able, flat cut sail, and heaving to to bail out water that slopped over the gunwales.

I guess the real issue I have with all this is that the world is lousy with racing dinghies, some of which are relatively inexpensive to build. What is really needed is something that has reasonable performance and is relatively easy to set up and sail. Such a boat should be used in other contests than racing, such as a fishing tournament, for example.

Building into the class devices, such as hiking straps, is already sending a signal that this class will be over canvassed for anything other than racing.

Hiking benches, if they are not set too far out from the hull (extending about one foot), IMHO, are not quite as bad, but send out the same signal.

Anything can be raced.

But not anything can be used for a laid back, comfortable day sail. Or be set up quickly, once it has been trailered many miles to the water. Most of the boats I have owned, as well as all the ones I'm willing to design, meet that criteria.

Such boats are not necessarily slow, but certainly not as fast as a pure racing boat, with straps, trapezes, and high aspect ratio rigs.