Hardware development

I was once sailing my IC and noticed the mast had developed a lot of rake. I looked to the bow and the whole of the foredeck was coming away from the hull and I was sailing with what looked like a giant biting mouth. 

Originally posted by getafix Hopefully this is the right thread for this question. I couldn't work out from the search results if such a thing has been asked and answered already, or not, so here goes. I noticed a lot of t-foil rudders at the dinghy show and these are now on craft such as N12 where I understand they benefit all those wishing to actually survive a bear-away in F4+ by stopping the nose diving and enabling the crew to even contemplate gybing in waves as well. Systems to control the rake / angle of attack (someone feel free to correct) seem very well sorted, there very neat examples on canoes, the rainbow N12 and so on.  So, here's the questions: i) do t-foil rudders benefit in other ways than just avoiding nose-dives? presumably lifting the back of the boat is advantageous upwind as well?  If so, how? ii) is there a speed cut-off where they don't or won't work or be so ineffective as to not make it worth the extra hardware to implement?

We haven’t found a speed ceiling yet with the T Foil.

On the N12:
1) Stability at speed
2) Transom lift
3) Pushes stern wave back, tricking the water into thinking the boat is actually longer than 12ft
4) Can adjust angle to lift the bow up in waves

In the N12, T Foils work on some of the older designs, but not so well in lighter airs, where a standard blade works better. On the Dead Cat Bounce, works well above 5kts of wind.