Sailing Directly Upwind

Bill: finally I will meet someone who drives as slowly as I do. Beer I can manage, not much sailing in Alliston but Barrie and Lake Simcoe are only a half-hour away if we can find a suitable boat. Or I can host a small army with kayaks and canoes ...

Geez Dave, where were you at the start of all this when I was trying to figure out how to do it? You could have saved us a whole week of analysis, argument, and passion that could have been put to better use

I doubt my little boat will have enough speed to generate significant apparent wind. I could experiment with a bean diet I suppose

Mostly I just want to see if it works and produce a workable alternative to floating windmills. I'm also interested to know how such a rig will behave on other points of sail. Once I've done that the torch must pass from my failing grasp ...

 

I just realized that my speculation about optimal efficiency was nonsense. What I was thinking is that this device doesn't have the inefficiencies of sails on high and low points of sail, and it doesn't have the inefficiencies of rotating foils. But it obviously has its own inefficiencies in the pauses at each end.

Kayaker, since I didn't contribute anything except a summary of all that analysis and argument (sans passion) I doubt that I could have saved you anything by coming earlier.

When on a project, a bean diet has the additional advantage that it discourages people from hanging around and trying to talk to you while you are working .

I used to have a dog who would be laying on the floor half-asleep, then fart, then jerk his head up and back towards his tail as if startled. He would have this sleepy, puzzled look on his face that used to crack me up every time, "What the heck was that? It sounded like an explosion coming out of my anus! Well, that can't be. Must have been dreaming."

 

An old friend who used to breed dogs had a favorite old labrador he used to leave with me when he went hunting with his younger dogs. The dog would fart then have a coughing fit; we suspected he was trying to cover up. Later (about 20 years later) my then teenage daughter admitted she had been feeding him buttered crackers behind my back.

 

I wonder if anyone is still subscribing to this thread? Well, building is underway on this and other projects in related threads. I will post pictures soon on progress.

 

Still watching and holding my breath that your ideas get built and explored, discussed and improved.

There has been an exodus lately of some very notable people (PAR etc.) from Boatdesign.net due to some folks refusal to keep things gentlemanly.

I think there has also been a general lack of interesting new projects being built. Unlike some folks here, theoretical discussions that never get built hold no interest for me.

I've grown very tired of forum contamination by regurgitated pictures and endless resuscitation of discarded threads, incomplete research and over-complexity. The signal to noise ratio has dropped into the "little more than random static" zone.

It would be interesting to find a new forum where people who actually build small boats were found, and active moderation of forum behavior was more important than page clicks and traffic stats. The moderator of this site (who I've never actually conversed with) seems to confuse traffic jams due to rubbernecking Jerry Springer-esque nonsense with useful content and contribution.

--
Bill

 

Count me as another one who is waiting breathlessly for the pictures and even more breathlessly (or less beathfully) for the performance results

 

Well, I'd better hurry if Bill is still holding his breath! PLEASE resume breathing guys, I can't take all this stress at my age!

So far I have kept busy making lots of fiddly little things that don't mean much without an assembly drawing, which is mostly in my head. There is a sketch at post #44 and I will try to use the same nomenclature.

The pics show the link beam (LB) mounted on the kayak I am using for test purposes. It is a kind of pivoting bowsprit that supports the Sailing Machine (SM) some distance ahead of the bow. The ply deck visible in the pics allows me to mount the LB without drilling holes in the kayak. The LB is telescopic for portability and is normally 8 ft (2.4 m) long but I shortened it to about 5 ft (1.5 m) for the photos.

The bearings have to be fairly substantial so I am using 6" (15 cm) lazy-susan bearings rated at 600 lb (270 kg); one of thesse can be seen. They will not get anything like that load in this application but they will encounter twisting moments they are not designed for, hence the derating. The bearing assemblies are held under compression with a bolt, and there is a thrust bearing under the head of the bolt. The bearings move very smoothly.

I figure the lazy-susan bearings will handle 1/3 of their rated load offset by their race radius of 3" (7.5 cm) which is 75 ft-lb (10 kg-m) which should acommodate weight and modest sailng forces. The wee oak saddle clamps in the pics are an example of the fiddly little things mentioned earlier.

 

The "Sailing Machine" also forms part of the http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/sailboats/articulated-sailboat-24598-2.html#post346142 project, the build for it is being shown there.

 

Still here just away during weeks so a bit limited with time..