CHINCHILLAZILLA

Foils and Stuff

2010-05-17T22:20:00.000-07:00

We had a great weekend in Santa Barbara. Richard's consistency is definitely something I'm going to have to try to emulate. The starts were kinda fun and with more wind and flatter water in the right, I started on port tack every race. Since it was pretty much a drag race to the right corner, there weren't many opportunities to pass if you made a boat handling mistake, and I made a bunch.

I'm gonna try to fix Richard's chewed up mainfoil from Long Beach. It's the first time I've had a chance to take a look at a Mach2 mainfoil up close. I always assumed that they were much lower area than my Fastacraft mainfoil, but after looking at them next to each other, its closer than I thought.

Anonther thing that stood out was the small flap movement. My foil has a whole lot of flap range. See the pics:

I couldn't hold the flap down and take the picture with my other hand very well but here's my best attempt at showing the amount of flap the M2 foil has:

My best attempt at measuring the flap down from my best guess at the neutral point is about 11-12 degrees for the M2 and 18-19 degrees for the Fastacraft. The M2 flap is bigger than the Fastacraft, so maybe that's how you can get away with less range. I think I'm gonna try limiting my flap movement some and see how it works.

Fun Weekend

2010-04-19T20:06:00.000-07:00

I think we can call it a successful event. We had 15 boats and great conditions for three days of sailing here in Long Beach. This was the club's first moth regatta and so much was learned. I'm sure the next one will be even better. There was talk of getting together some sort of west coast circuit, which I think is a great idea now that we have a few venues to choose from. Results are here: http://abyc.org/upload/Moth1.htm

As far as how I went it was a fairly inconsistent weekend. I had been sailing the boat a bunch and pushing my settings pretty hard. The week beforehand I broke a bunch of stuff and my boat never recovered. My extendable wand and gearing system ended up getting sorted out during the regatta which resulted in a lot of letter scores. I never came back to the comfortable place that I had been at before the regatta so had my head in the boat worrying about whether it was going to fly out most of the time. That said, the conditions were great and I had a lot of fun getting the opportunity to line up against some of the best guys around.

The wind came up after the last race on Sunday to a solid 20 knots and after some stupid steering on my part the horizontal foil on my rudder decided it didn't like being attached to the vertical. It was quite an adventure trying to bear away without a horizontal back there. I can make a new one as I have the tooling still, but I'd be interested in trying something new for my rudder and maybe seeing what the Bladerider or Mach 2 rudders are like on my boat. If anyone has a rudder that they want to sell cheap I'd be interested, some assembly/fairing required is ok. How long is a typical vertical? I measured my vertical and its about 4'3" from upper attachment to the bottom end.

In any case, the top priority on my development agenda is boathandling, boathandling, boathandling.

Long Beach Regatta April 17-18

2010-03-17T21:37:00.000-07:00

The NOR for the regatta at ABYC is posted here: http://abyc.org/upload/2010_Moth_Invitational_NOR.pdf

There will be online registration, I'll work on getting that set up. We've already got six boats at the club that got shipped from Hawaii, and there will be more coming from Worlds, so we're looking at a minimum of 13 boats or so. The racing will be Saturday and Sunday, but I'll be sailing most of the week in the afternoons. We usually have good breeze, so its a great place to start you're training for Belmont!

I've got some pics of my new extendable wand I'll post soon.

Helicopter Assisted Sailing

2010-02-06T21:37:00.000-08:00

Had a great week in Coronado for the PCCs. It was the first time I'd sailed with the good US guys, and it was an awesome learning experience. It seemed like that boat was going ok, most of my issues were in my boathandling and not boatspeed, which is encouraging, I even managed to sneak into the top ten a few times. I pulled of my first foiling gybe ever sailing out for the first race on Friday, and managed to make more gybes upright and foiling than not over the course of the weekend. I'm going to try do do as much sailing as I can while everyone is off to Hawaii and then the Worlds so that I can be up to speed when the boats get back.

The conditions through the week were a mix of lowriding and foiling, but overall you couldn't ask for better during the winter. The thing that made the whole experience was the Coronado locals, with Charlie hosting a great dinner and organizing the regatta, and the Henkens providing housing to half the fleet as well as their usual amazing hospitality.

I've progressively cranked on the angle of attack on the mainfoil and have been foiling more and more bow down as a result. The rudder is longer than the daggerboard, which seems to be a good call, as the rudder has yet to ventilate even at extreme bow down angles. The boat is definitely more draggy when lowriding, bringing to mind thoughts of on the fly mainfoil angle of attack adjustment... The fact that I don't have a dial to take off flap angle when lowriding doesn't help much either. These issues have started a lot of thinking about different wand linkage systems, but I'm going to try to stay pretty conventional while I figure out how to actually sail the boat

It was cool to see how the guys have developed their light air foiling technique. I think it made the light air races much more interesting, and it would be a shame to make everyone sit perfectly still and lowride when they could be flying. I managed to get a nice boost from one of the Marine helicopters that was circling around the racecourse. In pretty much lowriding conditions, it left what felt like a 15-20 knot puff behind it which needless to say, easily popped you up on foils. Maybe I've found my perfect light air foil technique, the fuel bills could get expensive though.

Infestation

2010-01-24T20:05:00.000-08:00

We had six moths sailing yesterday at ABYC, which I think is the all time record. The coolest thing is all the boats were local boats, which bodes well for the future of our fleet. I hadn't sailed my boat in foiling conditions in over a month and felt really rusty. We were all in a similar situation as the weekends have been decidedly lacking in wind for the last month or so. It was a good chance to get the feel back before we head down to San Diego next week. I'm really looking forward to making big gains in my skill level, and I think I'll be able to get down there on Tuesday and sail through Sunday. Anyone else gonna be around early in the week? I'm bringing as much of the shop that will fit in my car. Vacuum pump, carbon, epoxy, jigsaw, etc so that I hopefully don't have to make the 3 hour drive back to Long Beach to fix anything mid week.

The pics are from some sailing in San Diego I did a while back. Looking forward to the flat water of South Bay, I've heard rumors of 20 boats showing up.

Foil Setup

2009-11-09T21:35:00.000-08:00

After listening to the latest mothcast I decided to check my main foil angle of attack. I made a template of the foil section and drew the chord line and lines at 1.5, 2.5, and 3.5 degrees. It slips over the tip of the foil. I added some thickness to the trailing edge and did a really quick and dirty job of fairing the thickness into the flap. I've got it in pdf and dwg formats, so if anyone wants it I'm happy to email it to them. It plots on a letter sized sheet. I used a laser level to get the boat level and then shot it on the template. Wow, my foil was at not much more than 1/4 of a degree! That explains a little why I had to hike off the back of the wingbar and was sailing around in full flap down mode. I guess I was a little less than accurate in drilling the hole for my main foil and/or set it up at the wrong angle. I thought I was doing the right thing by putting the daggerboard at 7 degrees of forward rake, but apparently not. Needless to say, the boat sails a lot better now.

I didn't realize people would be so interested in the photo of Karl's boat. My attitude is that the more people that see your stuff the better, and I hope that everyone takes another look at the bowsprit concept. It's definitely on my list of stuff to do once I figure out how to keep the boat upright. The funny thing is that the bowsprit is possibly the least radical part of Karl's setup.

Flashes of Brilliance

2009-11-07T19:55:00.000-08:00

A lot has happened since my last post.

I competed in my first moth regatta. It went about as well as I expected. Had some good moments, including rounding the top mark in second with a pretty big gap between me and the guys behind me (that ended when my vang blew up on the downwind.), and also had plenty of mechanical issues. The second gantry is holding up well so far, it does everything it's supposed to and hasn't self destructed yet. Richard won, and Paul came in a close second after driving all the way down from Santa Cruz. Karl's boat showed some impressive speed at times as well, I'm excited to see the further development of the tilt-a-whirl. Here's some pictures:

In other news, Chinchillazilla#2 was launched. Bobby worked almost non stop to get it done after getting back from South Africa. There wasn't much wind for the launch, but it floated, which is good. Richard took some pics:

The boat looks great!

Next up is the Turkey Day regatta in a couple of weekends. Should be great and we're hoping to get some of the mothies from San Diego to come up.

Gantry #2

2009-10-17T18:24:00.001-07:00

So here's my second attempt at a gantry. Its got a different control mechanism too. I told myself when I launched the boat that I wouldn't change anything till I figured out how to sail it, but breaking my first gantry accelerated my development program a bit. The new one has held together through two days of sailing in 0-5 kts so still haven't been able to really put it to the test. The adjustment mechanism seems to work. The biggest problem is now that I can adjust rudder angle easily, it's easy to put it in the wrong place.

There's a million things I would do differently for the next one, and might get the chance to do soon, as Karl's new rudder is coming along and he's thinking about a new gantry to go with it.

It weighs about 725g with the adjustment mechanism which is about 200g heavier than the last one. I think I could get about 150g out of it easily for the next one. What's a good weight for a gantry?

Gantry #1 RIP

2009-10-06T21:36:00.000-07:00

I've got five days on the water now and had my first major breakage. While blasting downwind my gantry decided it wanted to turn left while I was turning right. What actually failed was one of the attachments to the hull. This was two weekends ago and I've spent the last week and a half designing and building a new one. When I built the first one there was almost no engineering involved, so I decided I'd put in a little more time in the design department. I definitely underestimated the side loads created when foiling at high speed and how easy it is to load up the gantry with less than smooth steering (which right now is pretty much the only kind of steering going on).

The question is: how much load is there really? If you assume a Cl and speed for the rudder, you get a load that if applied to you and the boat, would quickly flip the boat/vaporize the rudder/accelerate you sideways quickly enough to make you black out. This doesn't seem to be a realistic load case. I think a more reasonable load case is applying the full righting moment and resultant sideforce to the rudder with a safety factor. Any more than this in theory would capsize you.

A second thought: how many gantries actually fail in buckling versus a failure of the attachment points/joints? It seems like it's pretty easy to design a tube for good buckling strength, but designing an attachment or joint that can handle all the multitudinous load cases is the tough part. Given my gantry failure data set currently has one point in it, I don't have much to go on. Anyone have any thoughts?

Congrats to Karl on getting married! I hope this doesn't affect his mothing time too much.

I'll post some pics of the new gantry as soon as its on the boat.

First Sail

2009-09-14T22:15:00.000-07:00

Finally!

Now that the boat is in the water I thought I'd start blogging. I've got some pictures of the construction which I'll post over the next month or so. My favorite moth blogs have pictures of boat setups and technical information, so I'll try to keep the content along those lines.

First, proof that the boat does in fact float:

This project started out last fall when one of my coworkers, Bobby, and I decided we wanted to build some boats. A-cats were great, but a little beyond our budget and space availability. Neither of us had built composite boats or sailed moths at all so we tried to keep the design as conservative as we could. To make a long story short, after lots of starts and stops, I finally launched my boat yesterday. Bobby's is going to have to wait a bit as he's headed to Cape Town for a few weeks on Thursday. The boat seems strong enough in the right places and actually foiled on the first tack away from the launch ramp after more than a few capsizes getting into the boat for the first time. The basic setup is:

-Home build hull

-Fastacraft main foil (old version)

-Fastacraft wand and control cable (Karl's stuff from his boat's former life as a garden variety prowler)

-Homebuild rudder (I think we went for about 110 in^2, I'll have to check)

-C-Tech rig

-North V6 sail.

Here I am heading out:

Had a great first sail in puffy and light stuff and was mostly focused on keeping the boat upright, but had a few low altitude flights. The day ended when one of the nicropresses on one of the shrouds I made in a hurry at West Marine gave out and the rig came down. Wasn't a big deal as I was in a small bay and there was no damage. The boat itself was great though, not a drop of water it it!

I owe a huge thanks to Karl for all of his help through out the project, he put up with what must have seemed like constant phone calls and requests to borrow things, as well as putting a lot of work in at the shop.

Lastly, here's a really short video of me crashing. This one was actually on purpose because I thought I saw the harbor patrol coming (I swear).

Test Post

2009-08-17T22:44:00.001-07:00

Lets give this a try!