RS400 proposed changes

Trust me, every effort was made to get voting forms out to all CA members. there were notices emailed, posted and advertised. If you missed it, then it can only be your fault.....bar hunting you down and ramming a form down your throat, there was little else the class could do. 

 

Originally posted by Jamesd Things are never right first time round, fatigue doesnt happen over night, an engineer knows the process of design and its evolution.....you sir do not!

And a good engineer knows that a product shouldn't be released to market until it has been thoroughly tested.  Products should be adequately tested before expecting paying members of the public to do the beta testing.  It's far more expensive for a company to keep replacing faulty goods than to test the thing properly in the first place before selling it to its customers.  

The only reason companies don't test their products properly is because most don't have the balls to tell their customers to wait, because customers are so used to having instant gratification.

in practice this doesn't work. we are not talking about a car you can stick on a rolling road for weeks. You can run FEAs and run calcs on a pole which in effect is a cantilever, but used in an ever changing environment which sailing provides, you cannot test for everything. Also I know RS have a problem where they get little feedback from customers, If one pole breaks, they may have been abusing it, if 10 poles break there is clearly a design issue. the problem they have is those ten people throw the pole away, say its sh*t and get the ali one out.  

Originally posted by Jamesd in practice this doesn't work. we are not talking about a car you can stick on a rolling road for weeks. You can run FEAs and run calcs on a pole which in effect is a cantilever, but used in an ever changing environment which sailing provides, you cannot test for everything. Also I know RS have a problem where they get little feedback from customers, If one pole breaks, they may have been abusing it, if 10 poles break there is clearly a design issue. the problem they have is those ten people throw the pole away, say its sh*t and get the ali one out.   Remember RS are only customers like everyone else. They purchase something they have been told will work.  A few break, but i'm confident selden will get it right next time round.

You're right, a car has millions of components to test, we're talking about a single pole.  Regardless of who manufactures it, it seems they didn't test it enough and it doesn't matter if RS are the customer, they're the ones putting their name to it.

Would it really have been beyond the realms of RS or Selden to have given a selection of customers the product to test for a year in all conditions before releasing it to market?  I'm sure the CA would have had plenty of people who would rather have tested a product before release than be paying for it and testing it after release.

Originally posted by alstorer Originally posted by Hornet Addmitted the have been a nameless few that swap thier sails on windy day then revert to the new ones on the following day! Talk about can of worms! Can of worms? Pretty easy to write a rule into the SIs banning this. Quite common in classes with open sailmakers that want to limit people having a "windy" cut and a "light wind" cut in order to control costs. Simply say that only suite of sails can be used, and that any changes due to damage have to be notified in writing. Without such a rule, there's no can of worms- it is allowed. Plain and simple.