Grob,



Thing is that others gave me the same work over, pardon my French. I know the feeling well. That is why I started my earlier post with a reference to constructive criticism.



I've been aware of your webpage for a while and have kept an eye on it and I on it to see what you come up with. Coz lets face it, only designers going to extremes come up with really new stuff. And that is exiting.



Personally, I bombed out with a extremely small main beam which was intended to function solely as a compression bar while the dolphinstriker was intended to take all the mast step load. In theory it all fit. Solved the buckling problem and the beam was even under less stres than bigger beam. There was a very remarkable phenomenon at work there. I was convinced it was a closed argumentation and that it would step up to the expectations.



Than I picked up my mast at Saarbergs and discussed beams. Pieter told me albout the A-cat experience in small beams and said in a mnay words : "Small beams never worked, platform lost to much stiffness to work properly; we (A-cat sailors) don't go for small beams anymore rather to larger ones."



I was still convinced of my own design, figuring that a large portion of the stiffness was given by the rigging. Than I sailed my own cat with only the inside bolts of the rearbeam unscrewed by as little as 2 rotations. The boat walked over the waves like nobodies business, instead of sailingover or throught them. She was an absolute dog to sail in waves.



And than I realised exactly what Pieter meant. My stress theory was probably right no arguments on that, but I forgot to figure in stiffness of the platform and grossly overlooked the fact that that is an very important issue in the general behaviour of the boat. My main beam design was likely to be inadeqaute to resist torsion and probably would have all but lead to very a flexible platform which was greatly outweighing the gain made by the 4 kg weight savings.



As you can see, you are not alone in this; I'm also quite sure that the greats like Saarberg travelled much the same route of critisisme, testing, Failure and succes.



On my own deisgns ;



Personally I choose not to design everything myself from scratch but to take what is proven to work and redesign things I know that can be done better. With a lot of help from others I must add. These discussions with others do indeed weed out the bad from the good idea's quickly although one has to swallow ones pride from time to time.



Anyways, good luck in the competittion (and I do really mean that, no crack)



Wouter