Welcome to the Hobie 16! Hobie racers have been trying to reduce frame slop in the Hobie 16 for decades. It's just part of the design where each corner casting has three individual parts that must fit together (or 12 total frame joints on the boat), there's bound to be slop. If the joints were significantly tighter, you'd need a hydraulic press to put the boat together. However, the corner castings on the newer boats were improved to help make the boats a bit stiffer. The old rule of thumb was that if you can raise one bow higher than a foot before the other bow starts to lift, your boat is too sloppy. If you're not racing, I wouldn't be too concerned about this. Just tighten the tramp as much as possible and sail. If you've got a really sloppy boat, the only real way to stiffen things up is to epoxy the corner castings. Coat them with release agent first if you ever want to be able to take the boat apart again.

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