D-Zero

Originally posted by Medway Maniac Oh yes, lighter boats blowing off trollies - that's something I would have thought someone would have mentioned on the Aero thread by now.

With a gunwhale hung trolley?

Oh sure, with sufficient carelessness anything can get blown off. But a light boat on a gunwhale hung trolley ain't going to blow off any more easily than a heavier boat on a low cradle.

My reason for buying a D Zero was because speaking to Dan I know how much attention has gone in to the design, from a pure quality of sailing perspective. And it looks good, is very low hassle and the price was great.

Inspired by Dan's Punk, I had been considering building my own boat and Dan was generous enough to share much of what he learned from the Punk development.

The mast bend, for example, was carefully designed and engineered to be similar to that of a contemporary OK or Finn, but modified for the extra leech tension from the square top sail. The underwater hull shape is not based on what is easily built from sheets of ply or pre-fab composite, but is based on a smooth curve of areas and good all-weather hydrodynamics.   Coupled with Dan's proven ability to get the best out of a Laser, it seemed to me that the Punk was a very carefully and well designed craft, and the Zero builds further on that, with the added benefit of Devoti's quality and experience.

The Aero has some neat touches - the built in bottle holder, the laminated in calibration marks, the fancy foil edges etc, but rightly or wrongly I didn't imagine that the mast was carefully designed so much as made to a price, and the hull based upon minimum weight perhaps at the expense of optimum shape.

Edited by Peaky - 25 Sep 14 at 1:42pm

Originally posted by Peaky  and the hull based upon minimum weight perhaps at the expense of optimum shape.

Edited by kneewrecker - 25 Sep 14 at 1:56pm

Originally posted by Peaky I may have missed your irony in my haste!