What a load of crock !
I'm refering to these statements :
400lbs leaves a large margin of error for this kind of development. Yes, you can build a lighter boat but you will have more teething problems as you work though the "add more where it breaks".
My Nacra F17 weighs in around 320lbs. Pretty heavy for a singlehander. But, it is bulletproof . If you go lighter, you can't touch the beach, sit on it, or survive a collision on the water. That's just the way it is in the F17 class.
Bob, my 1974 Prindle 16 was 20 lbs lighter then your 320 lbs Inter-17 and it was a doublehander with more sailarea as well. That boat is still sailing now, over 30 years after its resin was poured.
Jake, all of a certain new F18 model all the daggerboards that were shipped to EU in the spring of 2006 broke, that was AFTER the daggerboards had become shorter and wider then the previous model of the same company. A befriended crew owning this model for about 1 week broke BOTH daggerboards at the same time and was drifting about pretty helplessly.
The most pronounced breakage of a Vectorworks Marine F16 was single daggerboard that split while sailing and a single seam that started to crack up; both were the result of insuffient wetting out of the laminate. In both cases the crews finished the (distance) race. Note how VWM is totally new to producing these sports cats while Hobie and Nacra has decades of experience and that VWM is no producing 240 lbs dependable boats while other are producing 320 and 400 lbs barges that break down significantly more often.
Now this is not intended as a pissing contest between VWM and Nacra/Hobie. This counterargument is whole intended to show that putting more weight into a design is alot less important then actually pouring some design expertise into it. How else can a newby like VWM produce a much more challenging design with quite a convincing dependability record ? And how else it is possible that my 1974 Prindle was lighter then all newer designs (like nacra 5.0 and nacra 500) that came after it ?
Being "heavy", no matter what the spin is from the company reps, is nothing more then an economically inspired choice !
And Bob, your boat isn't bullet proof by a long shot. I dare say that I can even fire my 4.5 mm (177) caliber pump action air rifle at it and puncture its hull. And I've been running up my homebuild TIMBER F16 up the beach AT SPEED for 3 years now because of the surf we often get around here. My fellow Blade F16 owners at my club do the same with their glass VWM Blade F16's. And typically every race day we sit on the hulls or bows of our boats. I think all of us have walked over our bow to the tip of the spi pole to correct a rigging mistake we made at one time. You know the one where you mistakenly wrap the tack line around the pole ones before tying it to the spi itself.
You guys are just speaking nonsense. You are both knowlegdable people but on this topic you two are just waaaaay of base.
And I'm just laughing my socks of when a carbon masted I-17 is 320 lbs while my homebuild F16 with an alu mast, more sailarea and for crying out loud even a BRIDLED jib comes in at 240 lbs and is surviving the bloody North Sea without any problems. We get wind, chop and washboard like surf conditions you guys simply won't believe. Think Texel video 2005.
And in defense of the 18HT's, at 135 kg and carbon mast without a bridled forestay these design have absolutely no reason to be fragile. If they are as a class and it is not proven that they are then it is because the individual designers made the wrong construction choices.
Or, just get into the largest growing class at this time: "A".
Bob, how do you square this with you earlier statement ? The A's are the lightest singlehanders around. 320 - 165 = 155 lbs lighter then your I-17. Going on your earlier statement, one would think that these boats break when only looking it them. Which of course is totally not the case.
Wouter
