Boat of the Show?

Originally posted by rogerd I would give her a home so I could be a future owner.

IT WAS BUILT IN ZEALAND SO SHOULD TECHANICALLY BE A "HE"

These days the average Freddie sailor is a 19 year old slightly hungover student. Much as it was when I was a 19 year old slightly hungover student...

These days, I'm a beardie.

At the time Kevlar was being punted about as the next miracle fibre to
replace glassfibre, I seem to recall it had been used in the Military, bullet
proof vests, I think it was also a constituent part of chobham armour but
again, it was hearsay of the time.

Back then, what was going on 'down under' we wouldn't have been aware
of, the M25 had yet to be built and mobile phones didn't exist never mind
internet, most of this sort of intel was word of mouth.

How we got involved, we were trying to develop a small powerboat that
would pull a water skier around a fifty mile course in under an hour using
only a 50hp motor, and came across a boat design from a Guy calle Bo
Oldenburg, this thread prompted me to look him up, he lodged his patent
in the US office around the same time, but he'd already had succesful
trials of his stepped hull and chined design.
Patent pdf
We bought a GRP version, then with the help of a guy called David
Harper, we went up to Bolton or Burnley, somewhere oop North and not
far from the Dupont facility and one of their reps suggested using this
new cloth they'd just released..

Anyway the rest is as described, it didn't wet out well with either
Polystyrene or Epoxy resin fell in half and sank we had to revert back to
GRP, (Epoxy then wasn't like the stuff now, there was a place on IOW that
I got involved with much later, 79-80 building hollow epoxy aluminium
honeycomb sailboards, but that's another story.)
The other thing, Kevlar wasn't at all stiff, it's strength was more, impact
resistant, that G10 stuff is about the best application that uses it in fibre
form. I remember as the boat moved off the sides flexed, but it was light
and ultimately it did go fast and we achieved 48 mph with a skier prior to
that best speeds were sub 45 mph.

Edited by G.R.F.

Cool.

Originally posted by G.R.F. Originally posted by rors [ What's a 1957 Morris Oxford?  mages/ox001w.jpg"> 1957 Morris Oxford, every Firefly, Solo or Streaker sailors tow vehicle of choice..

Don't worry you're not to old, as Peter and
Dawn Langdon have proved and also
incidentally so has Mike Arnold, legendary
Firefly sailor and the man who designed the Alto!