And you spent a couple of years refining your design and most importantly - learning how to race it.

With the Tornado, there is a lot of detailed information on tuning the rig and how to set the controls. When you ask a question you are likely to get a very precise answer, like 25 cm inboard from ..... . Also you can buy sails with a tuning matrix that was developed by 3 Olympic Teams training against each other for 6 months. This makes it easy to have a fast boat from the beginning. With a 10 ft wide I20 you are starting from scratch. This is one reason the newer faster designs have a hard time beating the Tornado.

"Our boat was built in a similar way to the Gougeon boat shown, with lots of thin bracing and trusswork. The plans don't show this but it is relatively easy to work out for yourself (to replace the re-inforcing shown). "

John, if you have any photos/ sketches of how the cross-bracing works and what you fix it to on the hull sides I`d be interested in seeing that - The SA Mosquito`s are built a bit heavier than the Auzzie boats because we don`t get the lightest plywood sheets here, have to make do with what gets imported. If we can save a bit of weight on the internals I`d be keen to investigate further.
How much weight do you think that building method saved from the conventional method on the T ?
Most of our internal bulkhead are polystyrene except for the beam bulkheads, bridle bulkhead and daggerboard case stiffener, so not sure if we can save that much weight. Would only be worth building new hulls if I KNEW I could get 4kg per hull lighter. Not likely when they weigh about 21kg each though, although the Auzzies build them to 18kg or thereabouts, so could be possible ?

Steve,

I don't think I ever kept any photos from the build of 'Eric', but if I did, God only knows where they'd be now....

Essentially, where the plans showed bulkheads with lightening holes drilled in them, we built diagonally braced trussed frames. Where the plan showed 6mm, we used 5mm. For 5mm we used 4mm and so on. The re-inforcing under the beam trays was honeycomb paper and epoxy sheet (I've still got some in my garage ) and the longitudinals in the bows were balsa! Basically we tried to think lightness at every opportunity.

The deck beams were all shaved and shaped and were braced to each other before the decks went on. We did away with the gunwhale reinforcing on the tramp area of each hull and instead of aluminium track, we projected the deck out over the edge, re-inforced it from underneath, then drilled it to take the tramp lacing.

The area where we couldn't really save any weight was the centreboard boxes/main bulkhead re-inforcing just by the main beam.

The beam trays were made to an approximate shape for the beams and then finally shaped using microballoons and epoxy painted in and then the beams bolted in place with waxed polythene to protect them.

Once it all came together, even without the rig, if you lifted one bow the other followed after just a cm or so of movement!

Ah, how I miss that boat.....

One other point...the T is a moving target...keeps getting faster as new techniques/technologies are introduced. Not many classes allow this...newer Formula fleets, A cat etc are the few exceptions I can think of.