From your dedicated follower of new fashion in boat design
I repeat Craig's post from Facebook last night which covers the boat development nicely but before I do here are some further thoughts from me.
In my sailing career I have rarely taken the easy route. My world championship winning International Cadet was built by a school teacher for his children. I wanted a nice new custom built boat, but my dad thought otherwise and thankfully he was right. When I took delivery of the second hand boat it had to be stripped and completely rebuilt. The only thing left was the hull and the boom. I was lucky in that my parents left me to it. If I asked for help they would chip in but the work was down to me. It took me two years to work the boat up to win every event between July 72 to July 73 including worlds, nationals, area champs and opens. It required dedication to sail every day on my own in the Summer holidays and then every weekend in as many club races as possible in different boats to broaden my experience.
In my 470 olympic campaign, I teamed up with Jim Saltenstall for two boat tuning over the winter of 75/76. Every weekend we were out on the Solent from October to March whatever the weather, training hard, swopping boats, rigs, crew. I will never forget the shredded hands, the pain as your hands go from ice cold back to normal temperatures. The hard work elevated us from a ranking of 9 and 10 in the UK to 2 and 3 in the final Weymouth trials for the Olympics. But as you know, second in the selection trials is nothing.
The point I want to make is that success comes with hard work. In the article Craig posted on Facebook last night and I reproduced below, he sets out the effort he put into to not only building and preparing the boats but doing the hard yards testing the designs in all conditions. It takes hours to sand each 3d printed boat to the desired finish. Whether we have a world beater or just another average design, time will tell, but the principles Craig wanted to apply are well understood and the design delivers what Craig set out to achieve. The boats are thoroughly tested well balanced and we like to think quick.
In conclusion it is great to see a UK designer , if I may use that term, to use the latest technology, 3d printing combined with CAD skills, to rapidly test a series of designs. Gone are the days when you had to spend forever making a mould and then laying up a boat and repeating the process until you found the right design. Craig's talent is watching the boat carefully on the water, seeing how he wants to improve the design, going home, changing the CAD design and then printing the new boat and putting it on the water a couple of days later. Rinse and repeat over and over till he got it right.
Whilst Proteus is an exciting concept, we do not underestimate the challenge of competing with the latest top designs, VISS, V12 and the Venti. Having said that we relish the challenge of helping him develop a competing design. We still have lots of work to do on optimising the rig.
There maybe some who scoff at what Craig is doing but I for one support everything he does. There is precious little innovation in radio sailing in the UK but I think 3D printing maybe about to change all that.
While I am at it we have a debt of gratitude to pay to Juan Egea. He showed the world what could be done with 3d Printing and his design, the Alioth, is used all over the world allowing people to quickly get boats on the water. I sailed one for a year and made the mistake of not using Juans foils and ended up with a poorly balanced boat (my fault not Juan's). I got it sorted in the end. It was great to see his designs performed well in the US Nationals.
This is Craigs post
I bought a 3D printer and went a bit overboard. With much appreciated help from David Lindsay and Nigel Barrow who supplied advice, plastic and boat parts etc I built 6 boats (not all in photo) to completion in December and have bags full of assorted plastic bits and aborted prints.
The boats are split into two projects. The original plug for the Chimera design I built previously is in the middle and either side are 3 Proteus and Nemesis designs. All of them are different, but the Nemesis on the right has big design differences. The orange boat being only 140mm wide. Nemesis has gotten wider now to 160mm. Proteus has been refined, but is a fairly standard width at 172mm.
Between the three of us we sailed over a hundred hours in December in drifters to named storms on C-rigs. We swapped boats and compared notes and let anybody sail one if they asked. All the Nemesis designs went well upwind, but are a bit off the pace downwind ... working on that.
Proteus is a well balanced sorted boat that evolved from a long line of earlier attempts. I don't think it's a breakthrough, but it was inspired by the VISS and the Post-Punk to build something more aero and possibly take advantage of the end-plate effect. I am not sure there has been a noticeable improvement from getting the booms closer to the deck, but it may sail a fraction of a degree higher in some conditions. I do think there is some improvement from being more aero when the wind comes up. They seem very quick on B-rig and higher windspeeds.
Nearly all the hulls are the same straight line speed upwind, but the Proteus is very easy to sail and seems to accelerate well.
The boats did show up glaring differences in rigs and setup between the 3 of us, so most improvements and work is being concentrated in that area. The setup is good, but we all feel its an area where we can improve.
And most importantly it looks pretty on the water whilst still ticking the aero and low boom goals we started with. I had a german professor who said in a road design class with a thick german accent .."If it looks good, it is good" I am sure he was right
There are some pictures of the boats here (sail numbers 23,54 and 112) https://www.flickr.com/.../swiftly/albums/72177720323287791/
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