I've read your post Jeff and I got a question about the following point.
You can make a bigger and puffier with higher buoyancy version for the adults and I would encourage you to do it but you shouldn’t plan to tinker with the minimum class weight’s exc to make your version more viable to adults at the expense of the younger users.
How do you think that adding bouyancy to the hulls will bring the F12 out of reach of youths ?
I would agree with you, refering to "at the expensive of younger users", if I were proposing to increase sail area or something. But I'm not doing that.
I'm just proposing to increase the weight carrying ability of the F12 platform by adding a little more volume and freeboard to the hulls. And this will not have to add much weight at all to the craft. To put things in perspective; increasing the width and the depth (freeboard) of the hulls by 10% (keeping the length the same) should already upgrade the hulls from 120 max displacement to 145 kg max displacement. The difference between max 70 kg crew to max 95 kg crew. At the expensive of what ? 2.5 kg combined for both hulls. Adding only 1.25 kg combined leads to max 82.5 kg crews. The associated cost is pretty negligiable.
Gato is suggesting that he can make the current F12 hulls at 12.0-13.5 kg where the latter number is an actually measurement of his prototype hulls. That leaves 25 kg for everything else on the F12. If we are using carbon masts anyway then we don't need all those 25 kg to complete the craft at minimum class weight of 50 kg. In that case I say, use the difference to increase the volume of the hulls so we extent the weight range for the F12's (in chop etc). I mean it is better than adding pieces of lead right? It would surely improve the marketability of the F12 to the adults/parents.
Wouter
