Minuet Yachts: a 2m fun boat-can the design be improved?

I'm thinking of ditching the drill motor at this point (cost, weight, complexity)

These are very much clown boats and not for serious sailing, but I definitely want to pursue the best performance possible from them.

I have a pickup truck with an 8 foot bed, and I'd be quite happy with a dolly and a spade rudder and bulb keel if I could find a fairly easy way to scoot it from the water into the back of the truck. The problem is that the Rudder would be deeper than the keel would need to be... As it is, I walk the boat to the ramp(standing in the water) and roll it onto it's side to insert a dolly under it, so I wouldn't mind too much having a rudder that I remove on the ramp from the bottom, as long as it's quick and easy to attach.

 

Why not have a cassette rudder that would allow the rudder to lift vertically in the cassette(trunk like a daggerboard)?

 

Yes exactly! That would work fine too.As long as the keel is the first thing to hit the bottom I'm happy. Then I can have a high-aspect spade rudder and a clean transom. As long as I can keep it simple and the weight down, that would work great.

 

Angus rowboats have a neat and relatively cheap solution in their cute as a button toddler boat, Bumblebee. They mount an electric bilge pump as a jet drive in a cutout in the rudder.

http://www.angusrowboats.com/bumblebee.html

http://www.angusrowboats.com/images/bumblegrass.html

https://www.flickr.com/photos/angusadventures/15209637124/in/album-72157665794105500/

 

Bilge Pump Jet

Thats a really interesting idea, TT-thanks!

 

I've not had to load anything onto a flat bed, but I've been looking at various ride on lawn mower sites, and getting a 175KG mower onto a truck seems quite common there are a lot of Ideas around It might be worth a look.

Skyak, sadly the boat and it's trolley are in pieces at the moment undergoing a rebuild, or to be more precise it's sitting in pieces doing nothing, because until this week it's just not been warm enough to do any resin work
Then I've just lost a weekend officiating in the Three Rivers race, My Parents are coming down for a visit , for a month , I'm going to be on duty for a Yeoman Open, then it will be our clubs Annual regatta week, so I won't be able to start this years work on it until the second week in August.

 

How about a manual bilge pump? We used one of these recently to get some water out of a parked boat and it moved a LOT of water very quickly. It would be lighter and cheaper, and it won't run out of juice before I do. I would just route the outlet hose to an aft-facing outlet port and have an inlet port and have the pump mounted permanently in the bottom of the boat, maybe with a valve to pump from inside(if swamped) or outside.
http://www.westmarine.com/buy/west-marine--manual-bilge-pumps--P011_330_003_501/zoomImages

 

So I chopped 16 inches off the mast without reducing the sail by reducing the gap between the sail and the boom, and playing some magic with the masthead(the sail now hoists several inches above the mast) and I recut the bowsprit drifter to fit as a 162% genoa. The boat does feel a teeny bit stiffer with that extra bit of weight gone. Also, this whole cardboard thing is really starting to be a pain in the butt. One leaky window and I've got a soft area by my left window I'm thinking about gutting it and doing a big rebuild to replace everything above the waterline this winter.

Winds were 16 gusting to 23. After the wind died I could shake out the reef and try the new sails.

 

Looks like you have now got a semi-gunter rigged boat!!
It's of the reasons my orginal version of my boat was gaff rigged, so when the wind got up I could reef and move the weight of the gaff down.

 

It's not exactly a gunter rig, but it is similar I suppose. The upper half of the luff of the main has a 3/8 x 3/8 inch strip of sitka spruce inside the sail. The lower half has a zipper sleeve that goes around the mast. It was a way to do a fractional rig with no sail track and still allow the main to be hoisted above the tang. The downside is that when I'm reefing, I have to clip that little black strap around the mast, so I have to lower the main completely, clip that on, and re-hoist. It works alright but a track would be much better. The cool thing is that I was able to move the main halyard attachment point down the luff about 8 inches so it can hoist higher than the mast. The sail shape in general though is terrible with a ripstop nylon square top fully battened main with battens that don't give a good shape. I'll try making something with much stiffer fabric at some point.

 

Pocket yacht #2!

Working on the design for number 2! I'm having a really hard time getting the lead over 10% without cutting into my crotch space on the keel trunk. I want 15% lead. Unstayed 12 foot keel-stepped mast, keel to starboard, mast to port of centerline. Draft is 3 feet with a 50 lb bulb keel. Total Displacement with crew is 275 lbs. Rudder is in a cassette, and is completely hidden when operating. LOA and LWL is 8 ft. I added a 1 foot permanent bowsprit and asym spin. Jib is on a furler, and the main is slugs in a track.

 

Looks an interesting design, you appear to be going for a high perfomance design limited by it's very small size.
If the bowsprit is totally permanent, you may as well increase the water line length, then bringing the turn of the bow higher, to reduce the profile forward of the keel.

 

The LOA is limited to 8 feet. I already tried cutting away hull up front, but the drag went up so I put it back. I only added the bowsprit for the spinnaker.

 

Got the model into solidworks! Next is engineering built in flotation and the keel trunk, seat back, rudder housing, etc.

 

Looks like a really sweet design.

What are you going to build it out of?

I'm thinking of building my 8ft design.

It's the antithesis of yours.

For some reason, I have a fascination with archaic ways of doing things, so my boat won't even have a board.

It won't even have curves either.

It's so wacky I'll certainly build a scale model of it first, to make sure it will work.

Then, if it does, I'll build the full scale boat and maybe make a few bucks every outing, with waterfront bets against it being able to make it to windward.

If does manage, it probably won't get far past the 120 degree line (60 degrees off the wind).

It can be built from two sheets of 1/4 inch plywood and a few pieces of timber. Its all up weight aught to be in the 60-70 lb range. But it might need some ballast to make it stable enough to get in and out of.

One way you might get more Lead on yours is to sneak some more buoyancy aft, so you can sit further back.

But this will surely compromise the performance to some degree, as the plan view of the hull will look more like an arrow point.

You can also make the rudder bigger, so the inevitable weather helm of a too short a lead does less harm. You can also rake the mast forward a few degrees. It may end up looking a little funky, but no one will complain, if it has a gentle helm and goes up wind past the 140 degree line (40 degrees or less off the wind)

All in all, I think you should be proud of yourself.

You have taken on a difficult design challenge and have come up with a workable boat.

Hopefully your next one will be even more successful.