Didn't want to highjack the tread anymore as well, so I started a new one.

So Jake, are you able to tack the boat by remote control?

I grew up in the Caribbean making these kinds of boat from dried wood. We called them pond boats. We would spend weeks shaping it with a knife and chisel. The keel was a simple piece of galvanize that we bent one way or another depending on the wind direction and strength. Nothing as revolutionary as this. Only a few weeks ago I visited my brother in Boston and we (both in our 50s now) were reminiscing about these boats. We used to sail them mostly in the ocean (Caribbean Sea). When racing, we would follow them in small row boats, and sometimes have to jump out of the row boat, and swim to the pond boat to tack it. Sometimes we were maybe half a mile offshore in 200' deep water. There was one guy (one of the richest guys in the village) who would build his boats from plans bought from the US or Britain, and nobody could beat him. I sent to link to my brother so he could read it.

Bajan, what part of the Carribbean? I did the same thing when I was a child/teen. We used to build our boats out of foam that we would find from roof insulations. We would shape them up, apply a few layers of resin, attach a buld and go racing. I can proudly say I was a champ in the two foot class. We use to swim behind our boats.

Man the stuff we did as kids, its crazy!

That sounds like a great time for kids - this one is a bit more tuned for grown-up lazy play...it currently has two channels of control - rudder and sails...both the main and jib sheet together but the jib is balanced on a boom so it will pop and and go wing'n'wing sailing downwind. The boat tacks very well and easily and is setup for racing around a buoy course (windward leeward).

The class rules limit the boats to four channels of control .. but if you add too much to them, it becomes harder to stay in touch with actually sailing it. My next one, however, will have three channels...the third channel will allow me to tweak the relationship between the main and the jib.


I don't have many good pictures of the keel, but if you look at this, you can see that it has a bit of righting leverage.


Here's the main winch used to control the sails


All the photo documentation can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/teamseacats/sets/72157594185325987/

And there is a US1M category with a lot of build detail on the teamseacats website.

Robi, that was on the west coast of Barbados. With the foam and resin, you were a little more advanced than us. Yeah, I won't trade those days for anything.

Awesome. That boat is much bigger than the ones we built, so there's no way we could swim, or maybe even row to catch it.

Here in Montgomery Alabama they started a club racing these:
http://sailrc.com/sailrcnirvana/home.html

a LOT cheaper than the US1M's and IOM's. Not quite as fast but much easier for a beginner. I had mine out yesterday in a serious blow and had a ball playing with tuning to get it to sail well in a big breeze (outhall, vang, backstay etc).

Down wind is a bit hairy when you try to round down w/o enough speed and the boat becomes a sub. Suddenly the rudder pops free as the bow goes down and it rounds up HARD.

We're starting a club here (we've got a great pond where I work...great for lunch time racing). We're planning to promote the Nirvana, since there are already two, and US1M. We may promote an intermediate priced boat with the Soling One Meter or CR419 since you can't expect everyone to jump in with a $1400 US1M.

This build, there are five local sailors who would like to get one of my one meters (Bogy). To help offset some of my time and cost, everyone will be responsible for a certain fabrication task and hopefully everything will come together at the end.

Jake,

That looks like it could be an interesting winter project, did you build from plans or to your own design, how long did it take you and how much does it cost?

Gareth

Has anyone tried out those r/c tornados? I bought the kit but haven't put it together yet.

We made our boats out of dirt and sand! One time the professor made an engine out of coconuts and bannana leaves for the boat but Mr. Howell and his wife (Lovey) stole it trying to get to the main land!

I have not seen one of those... do you have a link to where I could get one?

I designed most of the boat with the help of two guys I used to work with. We took several existing US1M hull shapes, identified what we liked and didn't like about each, and combined several features to arrive at this hull shape. I drew it in Solidworks, sliced it printable sections, printed them out, and cut shadow frames for a friend of mine to strip plank the plug.

One of the tribunal design council, Bogy, passed away from cancer before I finished this boat - that's why the design is called "The Bogy".

I purposely did NOT count hours that went into this project - I've got a lot of time in it because I have constructed everything with the purpose of going into limited production with it. If nothing else, I did it this way because I really enjoyed the design aspect of all the tooling. I could have pulled hulls directly off the plug and avoided a lot of the mold making I did (rudders, keel, etc.) and saved a lot of time.

My material cost for a boat is somewhere around $300-$350 plus radio (carbon hull). You can spend anywhere from $80 to $400 for the radio but the proper drum-style sail winch ($180), in my opinion, is really required to handle the sail loads. With the exception of the sails, everything is scratch built on this boat. I used carbon fiber in everything except the hull - I was proving out the molding process and lamination schedule so I didn't want to expend the expensive carbon fiber in the learning process!

There are tons of US1M designs out there and the class has a file of about 20 designs that are free to build. You can scratch build a one-off hull using the shadows, strip planking in balsa, and then lightly fiberglassing the hull (removing the bulkheads). It's an open box rule class with some relatively simple design parameters.

We have just started a new radio controlled model club and we use 2 models as our official club boats. The great thing is we have an in-expensive catamaran in our line up and the RC Dinghy (monohull). The Fast Cat catamaran model is $400 pre-built and $200 as a kit. The RC Dinghy is $255 with electronics as a kit and is real easy and quick to build (my sons put one together). We tried the Nirvana II but it was a typical China built piece of crap and the servo's in particular in the boats ended up having problems (again low end China garbage).

RC model sailing is a fun way to get kids and anyone for that matter into sailing,

The Nirvana can be bought w/o electronics and that's how most people are buying them now. I bought my boat/electronics seperatly and spent ~$25 more than the standard kit but got stuff that works.

I had an R/C catamaran that was pretty lightweight and terribly overpowered (on a scale of our current beachcats). The sails were not very good and the boat would not point well - as a result, the hull flying had to be done on a reach and then it was pitchpole city. I got tired of swimming and was deciding on updating the sails to something flat or move on to another boat - we had been tossing around US1M designs so I decided to sell the cat and work on the monohull (that won't flip).

Hey Jake

Nice work. I used to have a Maltese Falcon Mk2 Marblehead, had heaps of fun and serious racing against boats worth $1000's, unbelievable some of money that goes into them, removable keels, each part with its own aluminium padded carry case. Me with mine just sitting across the back seat of the car or rigged up in the back of wagon, just pull up, switch it on and throw in the water.

Regards

https://secure.victor-model.com/Product.aspx?product=A58B4CDE29D2BF2EC57780CAFC4002F2

One thing I saw someone do is to put some lead at the bottom of each centreboard and so when flying a hull if the weight came out of the water it would pull the hull back down.

Kinda defeats the purpose if you add weight to it doesn't it? An RC cat (or tri) can be a lot of fun but it has to be VERY responsive, it's length to width ratio needs to be very refined (so it flies a hull before it pitchpoles), and the sails need to be right. If they're light, they'll skate across the water at incredible speeds. After this round of US1M, I'm probably going to build a super-light trimaran...perhaps with a rigid wing (easy to do using model airplane techniques).

I was heavily involved with the mini40 model multihulls before heading to uni. 1.2 long, 1.2m wide, 2.4m tall masts.

Infact there are still two tris living in the garage at my parents place. They were good. Very easy to control upwind and would never capsize, only ever nose-dive downwind if you weren't watching the breeze and got caught by a big gust. Having three rigs of reducing size helped.

We built everything including, my favourite, the carbon spreaderless aerofoil masts with sail track. They were light, stiff, rotating and indestructible. A simple mould made of timber cornicing prepared with resin then wax and PVA release. Laminate was a layer of carbon unis (for the overall structural integrity and stiffness) and a layer of light glass cloth (for durability across the unis). The track was just hollow carbon kite frame tubes in the trailing edge when gluing the two halves together.

Good fun. But agree with previous comments, a good winch servo is essential. Basic remote controls are good enough though.

Yes lead does slow things down but you still get the advantage of the stability and righting moment. I don't think that you would have to put in as much lead as a similar sized monohull.

How do you build the sails? How do you get the shape right?