My initial replies.




Is covered in the current design.

However, may not be allowed in strickt F12 OD racing on international level if we ever get to that. Decision here has not been finalized yet, wanting for more experience to have been gained before making this decision.





Current design used a sleeved sail and as such the sail is fitted to the mast when it is still laying on the ground. The bottom of the mast is then attached to the mainbeam by a bolt (or was already attached when the sail was fitted). The rig is then erected from the front and falls into the V-ed slot of the push rods and a single bolt secures the whole setup. Derigging in reverse order. As the design uses no stays the front of the boat is fully clear and it is easy for a person to manouvre here.




My calculations show a different situation. On a boat of this size boards may actually make a very small difference. The design decision here is whether the difference that exists justifies the additional costs, additional building effort, additional risk of damage (warrantee) and the additional weight.

I fully understand that people may do a different balancing but I eventually found that the small difference was not worth the other drawbacks. Remember the F12 as it is now will outpoint the Laser-1 dinghy already. Adding boards may only give an extra 3 degrees pointing at max. It can not be compared to say fitting boards to a 18 foot round bottomed beach cat design were a difference of 10 degrees can be attained.




My initial hull design had them as well; but I was not convinced that the additional building effort was worth it. If anybody finds an easy way to do it then by all means lets have it. I initially concentrated on making things as simple as possible trying to get the weight, cost and building effort down to a minimum.





Please explain further.

I do believe that I understand what you mean, I have such a setup on one of my landyachts, but I want to be sure. It is a very good idea actually although it will complicated errecting the mast. On the otherhand, the rig as designed now also allows the sail to be fitted when the boat is flipped on its side while the mast was prefitted to the platform. I tried to avoid this way of rigged as I'm told most sailors don't have nice clean grass lawns or sandy beaches to rig on.





These hard points will see about 500 kg of loading (comparable to stay chainplates) and I'm not sure that wind surf mast steps can take that amount of sideways loading. I suspect they don't. Also the design of these hardpoint is pretty straight forwards as we stand now. They use standardized marine eye bolts and threaded forks.





Can be done with the current design. The mast can be lowered towards the front by removing the single retaining bolt (or two clevis pins in an alternate design) and it will lay flat in front of the boat with the sail attached. It so designed the sail can be removed easily by pulling it forward. This is basically the standard rigging and derigging method. The mast itself can be taken apart into three seperate sections in the span of literally 5 seconds, just as with the laser dinghy mast.





That is the reason why the standard design doesn't use a windsurfer rig but a rig much like the class 5 landyachts. Basically this rig can rotate around the mast indefinately. As such it can completely weathervane. As it is fully battened it won't flap about. Practically, one can even leave the boat fully rigged without risk of flipping it or damage. In an emergency just unsheet the main sail and let it weather vane completely. I feel this is enough emergency precaution.





Can you tell that I've been working on this project for a while now ?

Seems my design is already pretty close to what your kids desire. Apart from some styling that is.

Wouter

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