Thanks for the pic' of the Monster... Ducatis are great - not as fast as the Suzuki Hayabusa 1300 that I had before the Duc'! I swapped cos' the Brembo brakes on the Duc are worth every penny!!

The issue
The US Blade has a small (by comparison) front beam. When we put the boat on the lawn and picked a bow up there was a large deflection (something like 80mm) before the other hull left the ground.

Flex on any platform is the speed robber! We decided that if we need more speed from the Blade platform, it had to be stiffer!

Most 'rotation' is around the fore beam. The rear takes up the torsional load - we learnt that when we made Agent Orange some years back. So a huge rear beam was required.

At the sametime the Viper landed. Its got F18 sized beams - stiff you bet (about 15mm deflection)! So we decided to go that way as we could get beams and rig from one good source.

But beefing up the beams would then mean that the load would transfer to the hull bulkhead. So we had to beef these up as well. That meant decks off! Once the decks were off, new beam landings and bulkheads went in. We took the opportunity to add a subdeck into the bow area as we knew that the Goodall Wingmast with the current F16 set up, would develop more load and the additional load would be carried in the bows.

It was a huge job but expertly carried out on an Indonesian Island 20 miles south of us! The same factory that builds the Capricorn F18! So now we have a Blade F16 that's built tough to carry all the extra loads. When the decks went back on, the join line was polished out so it looks as smooth as now! Beautiful.

On our first sail, it was noticeably stiffer than the original... that can only mean good things.

Of course our next challenge is to sail it against what I believe is the benchmark platform now. A bit of rake, a bit of tweaking the ruder alignment and we'll see what we can do.

It's interesting for us as we've just got the Vipers so tuned up now. But with the same exact rig, we'll be pushing the lessons over to the Blade platform. If you looked through the Archive on my Blog, you'll see very detailed explanations. Soon we'll have those for the Blade too.

The Nacra 580. Yes its big, about the same weight as a F18. We've just resurrected an old Nacra 5.8 and surprisingly, its nice to sail. Sort of like driving a Limo!