I raised the ream beam on the HT, carbon scraps from Forte, added to the Forte beam. Its a world of differience, the rear beam doesnt come anywhere near the chop.

I changed up the travelor setup and its working well. You can cleat and uncleat under pressure, and you can cleat the main out to the end of the travelor and not worry about the main "autogybing" when you dont want it to.

Bill

looks great. we did the same on our ht last year but used some aluminum tubing which turned out to be about as lite as murray's custom carbon ones once we drilled out some holes. it does make a worl of difference... especially if you sail heavy at all. I remember I could barely breathe there was so much spray from the rear beam with me on the tramp and a 230 lb dude on the wire with the spin up.

no foot straps?

Looks great but holy crickey! Back in my beanpole days I could fall through that gap in the tramp.

Are you planning on addressing that?

The boat is just a bit wider than before...

So are you sheeting from the leeward cleat? Looks very trick.

And what did you use to bed the tube on the deck?

Bill,

I had to look two times at the solution. Very different from anything I have seen earlier <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />


I am also wondering how you like the tramp? Seems a bit short at the sides.
Is there a kick-up mechanism on those rudders? How does it work?

Cool to see some outside the box thinking with those beams!

I like your traveller setup. I have a classic old school centered cleat and it's hard to manage from the wire, I feel that your system could be far better.

Have you tried to add really thin pigtails to the blocks on the traveler? If you make them the same length as half a rail it would provide instant centering (pull until the block touch the cleat), reduce the amount of needed control line and most importantly remove the need for you to mark the middle with this ugly red tape on your nice looking carbon beam <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

At some point, yes.

Yes, sheeting from the leeward cleat while on the wire, a flick of the line and it cleats and uncleats very nicely. I need to find a way to keep it neat and organized. Some sort of bungee system, I havent quite got that far yet.

I glued the beams down with epoxy and then added a bead of 5200 around the edges. Mostly just to cover the epoxy that oozed out of the seam.

No, I think chicken lines are better than footstraps and I like the way Jamie Livingston has the cleats on his harness. I'll probably do that instead of footstraps.

What happens when you tack/gybe when you don't have the traveler centered?
Do you have to reset it to the new tack?

I like the tramp, I widened the boat to 8'6" so the tramp is a little skinny on the sides, it seems fine, I might add a piece at the back to fill that open area.

I have a kickup set up that is really just two lines and two clam cleats, one of them is an auto release. The red line holds the rudder up, the amsteel line goes though the casting and into the rudder by the bottom pintle and holds it down. I spliced a cover on the amsteel so it would cleat better and that goes in the auto release clam cleat.

It works well and is pretty easy to setup. I had this setup on my first HT and it worked great. I'll take more pictures and post them.

Thats a neat idea. I like the system, but it needs bit more tuning to make it really slick.

Yes, but I think if you are going up wind and tack, you'll have the travelor centered, so you wont have to touch it. And down wind, you could leave both sides at the same adjustment, so I dont think you'll have to fuss with it on each tack/gybe, but I havent worked with it much yet, so I could be wrong.

Bill,
How much have you invested in the front and rear beams, lifts and traveller? I need to start accumulating dollars. Are you happy with the widening? Thanks!

Dave

Both beams were $800 from Forte. www.forterts.com

Talk to Tony, he's got the specs.

I like the widening very much, the HT felt less twitchy. I was going to go wider, but worried about being able to trailer it legally, so I went with 8'6"

I cant remember the traveler cost, but you probably could reuse the current traveler.

Thanks, that seems reasonable. Did you build a new dolphin striker? Are your beams permanently attached now?
Yeah, the HT in stock form sure feels twitchy to me too, particularly after the SC20. I might consider going wider yet if I could break down the boat at the end of the season.

Dave

Dave,
The Forte beams are stiff enough, no dolphin striker is needed. I glued the beams into the beam seats, so it wont come apart easily.


You could easily go wider, just bolt the beams down so you could break it down for transport.

Any thoughts on how the beam ends might be reinforced to stand up to the loads the bolts would impose? And if I went to 9' 6", could I still get by without a dolphin striker?

Dave

You could ask Tony at Forte to increase the wall thickness of the tubes, to compensate for a 9'6" beam.

Why 9'6"? If you went 9' you could probably trailer it without getting caught.

I was going to go 9' and thats what the beams are spec'd for, so they wont be that much differient if you go 9'6". Take a look at the 18sq thread, the way they are making the tramp so that it stays attached to the beams and the sides is interesting.

On the beam ends, if you are just bolting it together, you might want to take a tube scrap and glue it into the inside of the beam. The aluminum beams have a second piece of aluminum on the inside, you could replicate that.

My old H21se was 9'9" and I left it full width all the time and never had problems. Even got pulled over for speeding once and nothing was said about the width.

Lee