Historical multihulls

The heritage of Rob James, James Grogono and the 70th/80th...

Guys, pls stop this ! (*joking*) Ilan Voyager, Gary Baigent and pogo !! Do you want turn my life completly upside down ?

Oh, man... I think it has a reason, why this 3-hull boat "Spirit of Ireland" (ex Colt Cars GB) poked me so heavily, unconcisously. I didnt know about the visions of Rob James. Havent read his book "Multihull Offshore". I know now I should have 20 years ago. Tks guys...

I did little bit research about James Grogono, too. And as it is a complexe thematic on its own, it should not appear within the sub division "historical boats". It deserves an own thread so I see it:

"The heritage of Rob James, James Grogono and the 70th/80th..."

 

So here is a front view of the Newick 53' Limmershin design giving a idea of the foils and contoured amas.

 

I've never seen a "new moon ama", I have no idea how well it worked because simply nobody reliable has told a word about it to me.
We were very sceptic about it when we saw the first drawings; dramatic loss of volume, complicated building, creation of high stress concentrations into the structure at the joints, creation of a pivot large enough to make capsize a tri...
Nobody has copied this feature. There has been several tries of amas shaped like low profiles foils; none gave results. Not enough lift, but big drag.

However I have a negative opinion by Newick himself...
I've joined the PDF of an article about Newick, published in 2010 in the mag Professional Boat Builder. In page 8 of the PDF there is an interesting sentence about the new moon amas;
"He later introduced “new moon” amas, with convex outboard sides to
produce similar dynamic lift, but has since moved away from these amas
because they require speed to work properly.
To keep the noses up at slower speeds, especially downwind when hit with a gust, he’s reverted to fuller amas with almond-shaped sections."

Put in plain English beyond the euphemism, that means that the "new moon amas" were a failure admitted by the designer. Not enough lift with big drag at low speed. I'll add and structural failure insured. And he went to bigger amas in the style of Irens in 1987. Look at the pic of Ocean Surfer, a very interesting oceanic 40 feet, second of the F40 of the Ostar 1988...Note the small self tacking jib, the big mainsail controlled by a good hardware, the rounded deck amas and the (normal) torsion of the arms induced by the leeward ama when pressed into the water. The ama is horizontal while passing the wave and its volume is aligned with the projection of the centre of effort of the sails. Beautiful.

I would like to measure a Tremolino running 23 knots over at least 1/4 of NM, knowing its weight, main hull shape, and rig and I'll swear that I'll become a worshipper of the Eastern Bunny.
A good reason of doubt that the best top Tornado with an Olympic crew (bronze medal) I have measured at Brest was 24 knots over 1/2 NM, so a humble Tremolino going almost as fast means that a Mustang can bit the *** of a Testa Rossa, or a 650 cc touring bike is as fast as a 750 GSRX Suzuki...17 real knots on 1/4 or 1/2 NM will be very, very nice and I would be very happy for the owner. 23 knots means flying on the ama...
These claims are exaggerated like the sizes and weights claimed by some anglers. We used to measure the speed of multis at the Week Speed of Brest and the real ciphers were always far from the claims, even with a 30 knots wind and flat sea. Piver announced in 1965 30 knots with his tris . Nobody could measure it. And so on. Curiously with the last generation of GPS, the perfect tool for measuring speeds, these claims are now rarer than Siberian tigers and honest politicians.

 

The boat built 1994 is in sale at 250000 NZ$. Same basic flaw of the amas.
1- Not enough volume. Sterns too thin.
2- Banana shape, thus loss of rigidity in compression of the deck. The ama will bend and stress heavily in torsion the front arm in charge of keeping all that together.
3- Under pressure, the central part is underwater, while the emerging bow make a formidable hydrodynamic brake. Drag, drag, drag.
4- In case of the boat going on his nose the foils pass into negative incidence, the deck of the bow becomes a shovel in the water and nope you'll make a nice forward salto.

Conclusion: surely a nice cruising boat to sail with a light foot on the accelerator, specially in hard sea. With decorative foils like the blue leds under the chicanos' cars.
Newick was a very intelligent man, and his last designs were totally different from the first ones. Look at the change of shape and volume of the amas. The banana shape disappeared.

Foils can be the worst and the best.
The worst because if the profile is not perfectly studied, it can pass in negative incidence or lose brutally its portance. The best recipe for disaster. You can forget the symmetric profiles, you need rather special asymmetric high incidence profiles. And you need good amas in case of...
On cruising boats I see it like a nuisance; fragile, ready to hit everything, no portance at low speed and you are obliged to make the monkey on the amas to lift or lower them. Better to care the design of the amas, you'll get better all around results...
The best when all the boat has been designed for the use of foils, specially studied by a hydrodynamician for your programm. With T rudders on the amas big big buoyant sterns...Or you make a true foiler like Ker Cadelac 2 but "modernized". For cruising it's a lot of complications and items ready to break. For a boat with no goal of racing but good mean speed, sweet, comfortable, easy and safe, foils are useless.

 

Cheers Ilan,

As I said, objective, and no surprises.

I talked with Dick Newick after the first Echos had been built in the mid 80s with similar amas and he surprised me by saying they had found a little went a long way with the new moons and they had been made less pronounced. Still in various forms they wound up on different designs with good for the time results. The rocker was really effective for over the wave sailing, now through the wave is the faster. Because of the bow wave the center keeps from immersing longer than you would expect. Keeping the sail plan as well as the hydrodynamics steady is best for maximum efficiency, over the top doesn't help either but is at least dryer. I'll try to dig out the article, the new moons were faster but did cause some damage to the aka joints on a stock glass Tremelino and so had to be beefed up.

I think Newick's best elements are the simple ones. When one is a state of the art designer it can be a sell point to have radical features. I do admire treating the ama as a low aspect foil, less efficient than the real thing.but less likely to stall as well.

 

A couple more new moon observations. It was how to construct them that got me calling Dick as I was very interested in building a Echo back then. It is actually straight forward because each ama half is strip planked over a mold then they are joined along the centerline with the appropriate bulkheads. Extra time needed for making the additional molds is the downside.

The inward curving side does add rigidity to the ama, compensating for the banana shape loss of strength,#2 mentioned by Ilan.

I wonder if they are drier throwing the spray outward, I'll be looking up videos of boats with the new moons to see how they look in action. This is a plus for cruising where comfort should rank with speed as a consideration.

As to the foils ,they are optional on Newick's designs. They do add speed on certain courses and conditions, for a cruiser this doesn't have the importance it does to a racer.

 

Woah Ilan. Careful about Dick's work

As someone who has been intimately involved with building a Newick Echo (I was part of a team that built a corcell version) I would disagree with much that Ilan says about Dick's design and ama shapes.

As the article Ilan attaches states, Dicks idea of high performance is the ability to sail quickly and comfortably up to winds of 14 knots and to achieve 20 knots with a minimum of effort. The owner of the Echo I was involved with talked to Dick about the new moon amas and it was decided not to use them. The dynamic lift was not worth the extra drag but Dick's design philosophy can still be seen in the drawings of the Val 3.

If you look at the Val 3 drawings you will not see the flat underwater shape of the Irens types boats. There is still appreciable rocker, much more than other boats of the same era. The reason is because Dick was a designer who valued the ability of his boats to sail sweetly and care for their crew. This allowed them to make fast passages. This is an often overlooked capability - the necessity of a boat to log easy miles with little stress. Newick owners often talk of their boats sweet nature and ease of sailing. Jack Petith cruises Naga and often sails away from boats that may have potential higher speed but bruise their owners.

So Ilan, the idea of saying that the Limmershin has the ama design wrong is not correct when viewed from what these boats can do for you. The high bow gives plenty of warning about overpressing, the fine sterns mean the main hull stern does not lift the rudder out and the bows do not get overpressed and don't worry about Newicks breaking. Dick was one of the rare multi designers to get some training in naval architecture and he had a great feel for the boat's dynamics.

Before I started on the Echo project I toured New Zealand and wrote an article on the Newicks there. The grandfather of Newicks was Max Purnell. He talked of them being like dump trucks, they were that tough. You can see an Echo being driven hard in the article - it has the new moon amas and the foils. The foils did seem to make a difference and the idea has been taken up by the MOD and ORMA tris, about 40% LOA aft, just where Dick put them.

In the end performance is a strange thing. Most normal people cannot sail a boat like an ORMA 60 or a MOD 70. They are just to demanding for any but the most driven people to sail. My 400 miles on an ORMA 60 was amazing but I was ready to get off at the end. I could not see myself able to keep the boat going at anything like full throttle for more than a few hours. For the vast majority of sailors, something like Thommo's Limmershin would be faster than a clone of us in an ORMA 60. The Limmershin would look after us and sail sweetly whilst the faster ORMA literally knocks you around and after a while you can't take any more. For 90 percent of sailors you would go way faster in a broad range of conditions and over a passage on the 60ft Rogue wave than on an ORMA 60 or MOD 70.

That is why it is hard to pull apart design facets of Newicks boats and say they are wrong. The boats sail so well because the amas are fine, the structure is solid and the rig nicely balanced. Thommo has had his boat for 20 years, Mark carter bought the Echo in the article back after he sold it. Jack Petith loves sailing his boat. For a sailor who loves swift, balanced and secure boats study Dick's boats and learn.

I spent a few years helping build one and I learnt a lot about the design spiral and why Dick did things the way he did. It was a good lesson to learn.

cheers

Phil

 

Thank you for the perspective Phil. They are sweet sailors, more important to the destination sailor than brute speed.

 

We won, by a number of hours (to be honest we thrashed the competition) the Auckland/White Island race (White Island is an active volcano in the Bay of Plenty) a number of years ago on Newick 36 Mokihi, with asymmetric foils in the floats ... except Max Purnell had earlier lost both foils somehow in the Firth of Thames (where he lived nearby) - I built them so it slightly annoyed me - either they had both slipped through the foil case bottoms or something else, have forgotten Max's excuses, maybe the wedges fell out ... anyway we sailed this long race without the foils, Max didn't even block the empty case bottoms (which also slightly annoyed me) so you could hear the gurgling and drag as we sailed (which also annoyed) but as said we still did a horizon job on the fleet - but to get to the point, towards the race end coming into Auckland we were getting 35 knot gusts and were carrying too much sail - but said what the hell - and I kept looking at the lee float being driven completely under; all you could see was the high tip of the bow and even that was disappearing too, so there was a bow rooster tail being set up ripping into the air, yet complete float was pressed below surface. Now the experts here will be shaking heads, how irresponsible, no way would Dick agree with this madness, asking for trouble, levering main hull out, lee float (no foil) completely immersed ... but I kept thinking, Newick is a genius designer even though we're carrying a brake. Did I mention our speed was high ... but if the foil had been there, we would be smoking on top of that. So we trounced the fleet of top Auckland designs (both mono and multihull) in a somewhat handicapped Newick - think that is all there needs to be said?

 

A look around onboard Lock's own cat "Deguello" a much upgraded and much loved boat which has also competed in several Three Peaks Races. Ok the video is pretty shaky but still worth watching I think.

https://youtu.be/k5XtB0yBymU

 

Thanks Corley. Access going forward on deck seems real poor. Like it otherwise....

 

I just like to link to the new thread I started... maybe I should have posted it here ( ). Anyhow....

If anybody is interested in an essay written by Michael Kingdom-Hocking in winter 2014 about the "history of cats + tris", here the two links of part 1 and 2.

 

A video of the Gougeon designed and constructed F40 trimaran 'Adrenalin' racing in Phuket.

https://youtu.be/qMNONPsCN1Y

 

Adrenalin

===============
Thanks!

 

F40 ?

To get pix of "Biscuit Cantreau " , " Adrenalin" and all other french and very few british 40' coastal box rule racers,
it might help to search under " Formule 40 ".
Same with also pre-web european " Formule 28 "


Formule 28

First generation, french " KL 28" originally was an OD which gave the parameters for the Formule 28
http://www.nauticaltrek.com/images/13/12051.jpg

French " CDK 28" , second generation
http://images.scanboat.com/boatsale/15018522_3_600X800.jpg

Danish "Crocodile", third generation, note early genny arrangement
http://www.fastsailers.dk/webblog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/pic_349.jpg

" Nielsen Trio " , fourth generation with crocodile's mainhull. These trimarans with about 200% + amas showed once more the overall superiority of the trimaran concept for racers.
http://www.fastsailers.dk/webblog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/cropped-hedder.jpg

Fifth generation Formule 28 " Herr Falk" ; now owned and successfully raced by Jens Quorning
http://www.multihull.de/story/kaempfe_falk2.jpg

Sixth generation Formule 28 by swiss Sébastian Schmidt , mainly lake racer ( e.g. Bol d'Or) .Formule 28 had no limit in mastlength, last generations exceded nearly 15m.
http://www.sebschmidt.ch/portfolio/88014/

Last and post Formule 28 by Seb Schmidt, lake racer
http://www.sebschmidt.ch/portfolio/91017/








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