Posted by: John Davenport on March 16, 2005 at 19:18:30:
In Reply to: Re: Carbon Fiber posted by Geoff Sobering on March 16, 2005 at 15:29:22:
I’d like to chime in here if I may. I have one of the glass-reinforced wood boats. The wood used is balsa. I purchased the hull from Jeff Kent (CSI) after it had sustained some damage from the trip to Argentina a few years ago. It was involved in a collision with my bass wood hull down there. The wood hull lost the fight. I have done everything I can to lighten the hull. I removed the bottom to access the inside and removed redundant interior bulkheads and drilled holes in everything I could before re-skinning the bottom with the lightest 1/8” ply I could find. It still weighs 51 pounds. It is the first generation hull, which is very narrow and minimum length. One of the guys in my camp, Steve Orlebeke, went to CSI and layed-up a 2nd generation hull and Jeff finished it off for him because he ran out of time. It takes a long time to do the lay-up. Don’t quote me, but I believe his hull is around 53 pounds. So this talk about lightweight hulls is a mystery to me. To me, the reason for the balsa/glass is two fold. Firstly, it is more durable! I have seen 3 minimum weight Spruce hulls broken fully in 2 this year alone. Completely in 2 pieces! A balsa/glass hull would not have failed so catastrophically. I feel safer in my hull at the speeds we are going now. Secondly, they require less maintenance. I am hard on my equipment and I don’t want to have to varnish it every year. I have sailed it for 4 seasons now and it is still looking OK. There is no reason to change the current hull specification. Glass/wood hulls have NO performance advantage! Also, there is no way of checking what density wood is used. That would be an enforcement nightmare. With regards to booms. Why should carbon be disallowed here? The Forstman boom is VERY light. I have one and I don’t like how it digs in to my collarbone, so I use a wood boom I made. It is heavy by Forstman standards. If I could use carbon, I could make one that is almost as light as the extruded aluminum one. I can’t afford to have an extruder on my basement, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to make a cheaper one in my basement that has equal weight to the one I can buy. That is the intension of the rule; “home built” isn’t it? I believe the spec for booms should be the same for masts except for the dimensions, of course.