Laser2000 vs RS Vision

Once crushed down, the average high performance boat would be no more than a few weeks worth of household waste, given that the average house produces around 15-20kg of unrecycled rubbish a week. If the enviropolice try to make us only sail "recyclable" boats I think it would be time to remind them that their precious wind farms are made of glassfibre!

If anything kills off production of fibre reinforced composites, it will be the Health and Safety at Work people. Though in reality, this would just mean all production takes place in China!

but it is easy to name slow heavy glass fiber boats  It has taken years for glass ents, gp14's solos wayfarere's etc to be significantly faster than their wooden counterparts.

Originally posted by Blobby Originally posted by Matt Jackson Originally posted by carshalton fc yer plastic is good and cheap but it isnt fast! But that's because it's early days building 'plastic' boats. Wait until there's more than a handful of racing classes on the water and do a comparison then, just don't blow them off straight away because in 10 years time we'll all think hand laying up fibreglass is really primitive! Plastic boats need relatively speaking massive investment in the tooling and therefore needs mass production.  That being the case, plastic boats will generally be targeted at high volume markets which probably excludes the top end of the racing game. Which brings you to the conclusion that plastic boats will always appear slow because the technology does not lend itself to making small numbers of very high performance boats...

Sorry, I disagree. The tooling for rotomoulding isn't that much more than for a decent hand layup mould - and it's certainly not an order of magnitude more like injection moulding.

Fibreglass seemed exotic and cheap (impressive how it pulled that one off eh?), but produced slow boats, once and look where that has lead - Carbon foam sandwich and the like. All I'm saying is that you guys are confidently making judgements on a technology which is in it's infancy.

I'm not making any judgment on current designs just trying to open a few minds.

Originally posted by Matt Jackson Originally posted by carshalton fc yer plastic is good and cheap but it isnt fast! But that's because it's early days building 'plastic' boats. Wait until there's more than a handful of racing classes on the water and do a comparison then, just don't blow them off straight away because in 10 years time we'll all think hand laying up fibreglass is really primitive!

Plastic boats need relatively speaking massive investment in the tooling and therefore needs mass production.  That being the case, plastic boats will generally be targeted at high volume markets which probably excludes the top end of the racing game.

Which brings you to the conclusion that plastic boats will always appear slow because the technology does not lend itself to making small numbers of very high performance boats...