Hey, Gary!

I was just getting ready to email you with some ideas on our mast raking sessions because of an idea I got off of Greg Scace's article for CRAC on a Randy Smyth seminar. The matter of weather helm 'feel' was too subjective for me.



So,... I thought I would mark my tiller cross arm and rear beam center points so I could see where my rudders actually were. Then I remembered all this amazing stuff about lift off of foils and the special characteristics of symmetric foils at : http://monmouth.com/~jsd/how/htm/airfoils.html

(thanks Wouter for the link in one of your documents)

So I figured 5-10 degrees would be a good angle of attack lift/drag ratio. I did the tangent on 21" lever arm, came up with 1-7/8" for 5 degrees, and marked it on my tiller connector. I think I have lengthened my forestay 3/4" from my raking outing with you, which is about as far as I can reasonably go back and is is little further than Randy recommended. I didn't have even a half inch windward helm. Then I started thinking air is one thing and water another and I happened upon your Bethwaite info. Thanks, bro! Anyway, I hope to do some more experimenting today. I'm going to make the marks for the rudder arms because you can't tell 1/4" at the center and still helm proper. Does anyone remember how much Ackerman is? (angle offset for 2 steering points to give concentric circles) It's going to take some time and research to digest this, but I suspect Ed Norris is correct if I understand him correctly, that the changes we are making are small and we are adjusting settings around the 'sweet spot'

Were you thinking of going to the speed trials at Ivanpah? Steve