I call BS on the whole tramp tightening issue.

From an engineering stand point, and woven cloth laced up as a trampoline cannot provide enough tension to have any significant affect on overall platform stiffness. We all know even a super tightened tramp will still give & deflect lots when we crawl over it...thus there is always more stretch to be found from the cloth.
Any half decently made boat will have the hull/beam joints hugely more stiff in the fore/aft direction than what any section of cloth & line can provide....so the example of a square with hinges at each corner is not a good one. I'm baffled by the suggestion that a bungie/shockcord laced tramp can have any merits at all let alone platform stiffening. I once sailed an TheMightyHobie18 with bungie lacing...bounced all over the place trying to crawl across during tacking in rough conditions. confused

For performance it's hull racking that we're interested in controlling...the tendency of the hulls to rotate in the vertical plane relative to each other. This is primarily dependant on beam twist characteristics and to a lesser extent hull & deck stiffness. Having a near infinitely high tensile/low stretch material as a tramp would reduce racking...as the diagonals would have near zero elongation. However, real world tramps are stretchy woven cloth...grommets/bolt ropes etc will pull out long before the cloth reaches it's max stretched dimension.

One effect of trying to achive high tramp tension in hopes to stiffen the platform is that the tramp/grommets/hul tramp rails/lacing points will fail much earlier as you crawl around on the super tight material. It needs some give to provide a better vertical component to the force counteracting your body weight.


Mike Dobbs
Tornado CAN 99 "Full Tilt"