Laser2000 vs RS Vision

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!

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...

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.