Dinghy hull weights

Yup everyone thinks that the lighter the boat the better, and although there are a lot of obvious benefits its not all good. The livelier the boat the harder it is just to keep it sitting on its trolly on a windy day or to keep it upright when recovering from a capsize for example .

Originally posted by Sam.Spoons ...reminded me that a 30kg boat is likely to be less ding resistant than a 50kg hull

That's over simplistic. An awful lot of the Aero's light weight comes from it being a rather small boat, so there simply isn't that much material.

Originally posted by Sam.Spoons It's the same size as the D-Zero and shorter but wider than a Laser.

Total surface area is what counts for weight though. There's a hell of a lot more material in a DZero

I imagine that there is not much diff in surface area between aero and zero. Zero a tad longer I guess.
Zero has 300gsm laminate as designed, aero 200gsm, which accounts for the difference, which I am lead to believe is around 8kg. And I concur with Sam spoons that a thicker laminate dramatically enhances robustness.
200gsm is fine globally you will just have to look after it 50% more carefully :-).
Saw something from moth nationals alister richardsons home build is 80gsm (carbon) over nomex now that is brave!!!

The Aero is epoxy - the D-0 is I think vinyl-ester, the Laser polyester (I'm sure to be corrected if wrong here !) .  The lay-ups vary enormously and so on.   The laser has alloy spars the other two 'carbon' .... Very difficult to compare and not necessarily appropriate to do so but on PY paper the handicaps must, in part, reflect these amongst many other factors - as they do.   I race against all three regularly and the relative speeds experienced  appear to be ... well I'd say the Aero 9 is generally the faster, pretty closely followed by the D-0 with the Laser a fair way behind.

'Durability' is very far from related to just weight of lay-up, resin system employed and so on... there are many papers and books on the subject ... and boring indeed they tend to be.  ;-)

Best to put down the keyboard really and simply try all you can .. 


Edited by Cirrus - 14 Sep 16 at 3:20pm