Edition
Boats for sale
| Rossiter Pintail Mortagne sur Gironde, near Bordeaux |
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| Laser 28 - Excellent example of this great design Hamble le rice |
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List classes of boat for sale |
PY - BANDITS |
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Daniel Holman 
Really should get out more 
Joined: 17 Nov 08 Online Status: Offline Posts: 997 |
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 Topic: PY - BANDITSPosted: 06 Mar 21 at 10:29pm |
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Its probably hard to unsee all the boats / cars / chaises longues / kettles that one has ever seen. And probably not beneficial either!
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CT249
Far too distracted from work 
Joined: 08 Jul 06 Online Status: Offline Posts: 399 |
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Posted: 06 Mar 21 at 10:45pm |
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There's certainly lots of valuable input from development classes, but some boats seem to do well without any direct lineage of the sort, particularly if they are from outside the UK. The standouts would probably be the OK, Optimist, Sunfish and Snipe on an international level. In other major sailing countries like the USA, Germany, Australia and NZ there's a very significant number of successful one designs that seem to have no such heritage (ie Sabots, Sabres, Zephyrs, Sunbursts, O Jolle, Seggerlings, Impulses, Lightnings, Butterflys, X Boats, etc).
Edited by CT249 - 06 Mar 21 at 10:50pm |
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CT249
Far too distracted from work
Joined: 08 Jul 06 Online Status: Offline Posts: 399 |
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Posted: 06 Mar 21 at 10:48pm |
That's what I thought, particularly because Bruce had been a fairly early exponent of moving to more Ud sections forward, but Bruce said that if there was any such inspiration it must have been subconscious. Obviously there is subconscious and semi-conscious transfer of design ideas that no designer could, or should, escape.
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JimC
Really should get out more
Joined: 17 May 04 Location: United Kingdom Online Status: Offline Posts: 6661 |
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Posted: 07 Mar 21 at 10:30am |
I sometimes wonder if it isn't as much to do with how you get accepted as a designer. Just about all the successful dinghy designers I can think of were front of fleet sailors. Now is that because you need to be a front of fleet sailor to be a successful designer, or is it because without a successful race record no-one else is going to build your designs? So is the background in development class design simply because it provides a platform to get noticed? And, for that matter, a ready point of comparison of how good the designs are. In yacht design a prospective designer can get a technical education and make a name working for an existing design house, but is there much of an equivalent route in dinghy design? If John Smith who's an average middle of the pack sailor designs a truly wonderful one off boat who's going to know? Or care? But if Jane Jones regularly wins championships in her own design National 12s then folk are definitely going to pay attention. Now I'm waiting for the paper from @Dan Holman - "the influence of the jug type electric kettle on dinghy design" Edited by JimC - 07 Mar 21 at 10:34am |
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Oinks
Far too distracted from work
Joined: 24 Oct 14 Location: Bandol Online Status: Offline Posts: 267 |
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Posted: 07 Mar 21 at 12:28pm |
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Was Ian Howlett a front-fleet sailor? Not sure he was, but could be wrong.
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davidyacht
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Joined: 29 Mar 05 Online Status: Offline Posts: 1345 |
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Posted: 07 Mar 21 at 1:12pm |
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Ian Howlett is no slouch in British Moths, but I think that he cut his teeth with Metre boat designs. I suspect that his route into dinghies was through his connections with Carbospars which saw the Howlett 1a I14 built at Hamble for Damon Roberts and a batch of self build Howlett 1bs built for some top notch sailors including Russell Peters and the MacDonalds who went onto to win the Worlds in SF in theirs. This was at the moment that Topper International and Laser were about to jump on the skiff bandwagon ... Phil Morrison was spoken for so Howlett was the obvious choice. Should add that the Howlett Salcombe Yawl is also very fast! So in Ian Howlett's case I guess that he was (is) a good designer, with good connections at the right place at the right time.
But in light of the previous posters, I don't think you need to be a championship winning sailor to become de rigueur in development classes, but you do need to design boats that attract the right kind of attention. You also need to do the miles, since the first iteration of your work probably needs refinement to the mark two. And you need to be around long enough to be around when builders or owners are looking for an alternative. To be frank most of the designers in these classes do not look to dinghies to pay the bills. In the glory days of the 70's the demand for dinghies, but more importantly the ton class keelboats provided a much better platform for young designers to get a foothold in the industry. And in keelboats the advent of Velocity Prediction programmes and CAD have spelt the end of the adventurous owner/designer partnership, I think Rob Humphreys said something along the lines of "you only found out how fast a boat was when you sailed it up from Lymington to Cowes"
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Happily living in the past
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JimC
Really should get out more
Joined: 17 May 04 Location: United Kingdom Online Status: Offline Posts: 6661 |
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Posted: 07 Mar 21 at 5:20pm |
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Yes, Howlett came through the yacht designer route, and to my mind is also an exception to the rule in other ways mentioned in a previous post.
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Daniel Holman
Really should get out more
Joined: 17 Nov 08 Online Status: Offline Posts: 997 |
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Posted: 07 Mar 21 at 8:22pm |
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My understanding is that Paul Bieker was never front of the fleet good in dinghies, but I think he is a great designer / engineer who I think got into AC late(er) in his career after beginning doing "proper" commercial work on fishing boats etc whilst tooling around in i14s for fun. There is a good article or two in professional boatbuilder from 2003ish. Regarding Jim C's point above, a generation or two ago, I think that the Richards / Morrisons etc cut their teeth in develpment classes for their own amusement prinicpally, rather than professionally at least at first. These were the breeding grounds for the best and most successful sailors at the time who in many cases crossed over into Olympic classes and had no issue with the technical ones such as FD as they were good at the hands on having designed and built their own N12s / Merlins / I14 back when all of those classes were attracting hundreds of the great and the good at nationals etc. Nowadays its a bit different with the sausage factory of the RYA system and SMOD olympic classes. I guess that so many of the hot shots (who have the cash) dabble in moths almost takes us back towards the tinkering sensibility. I think that no entity is going to invest in a product by a person who can show pretty renders alone, so even now, to get into dinghy design you must have been responsible for something with merit of some sort yourself to be able to get a foothold. Most dev classes are either heavily invested, productionised and developed to the point where any gains are going to be small, so that is not a route in that many have successfuly taken. I did something a bit different with the Punk dinghy in 2008 which by a very circuitous route means that I don't struggle to get dinghy design gigs. Then I did a development class boat later. Another way of doing it is per Paul Handley, who I think made a bit of money as a naval architect, and then himself bankrolled the productionisation of a little rotormould (RS Tera) which was eventually sold to a certain well known Romsey based sailing boat vendor. That went well and I think it meant he got the 8S100 gig, then did the K1 independantly. I think he is a decent sailor and wins most of the K1 nationals but was not a household name. I've seen a few dinghies by (otherwise great) yacht designers that were lacking because they didn't have that extra insight into ergonomics and technique that end use gives you. Sometimes the guy doing PM for one of those projects can fill in the dinghy specific gaps. But to cut a long story short, to start a career in yacht design, you get a job in a design office (I think) but to do anything commercially in dinghy design, I think one needs to have designed and or built at least one dinghy of some sort of merit. Nowadays I think product design ability is also important, but that can be subcontracted in as I think Mr Richards does.
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Dougaldog
Far too distracted from work
Joined: 05 Nov 10 Location: hamble Online Status: Offline Posts: 356 |
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Posted: 08 Mar 21 at 11:56am |
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Dan,
The other side of the coin is the strength of the 'in-breed' conservatism that exists in the restricted development fleets (but I would argue also exists in the one-designs that aren't really one design) as this too plays a big part. This impacts not only on the designer on the outside, trying to achieve a break through, but often an inside and accepted designer who tries something different - better even, only to find that the 'fleet' ignore it. I've documented a number of new designs that were commissioned and would be been a step along the path of progress, only for things to go wrong. It is not often a front runner who breaks ranks, so you get someone who may not have the best skillset but who fancies a punt at innovation - doesn't get it quite right first time (very few do) with the result that the idea, however good it might have been - sinks from sight. It just so happens that this is a 'hot' topic for me right now.... but I can't right it up yet! The interesting debate on the wider subject suggests that my 'Rock family trees for sailing' idea has just moved up the rankings from a may do to a 'must do' - now planned for a Christmas special! Hope to see you out afloat soon... Dougal
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Dougal H
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iGRF
Really should get out more
Joined: 07 Mar 11 Location: Hythe Online Status: Offline Posts: 6499 |
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Posted: 08 Mar 21 at 3:44pm |
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The problem we all have I hate to say it is the constriction applied by you know which group. The one thing we had in windsurfing was in the early days, freedom for anyone to build anything and race it, OK the RYA and IYRU eventually did for that as they have here, strict controls over our freedom to just build and sail anything you feel like in a competitive environment. You were lucky Dan in the moment you happened to get the Punk up and running we had that Forum Open Race meet for you to come and show us all what it was capable of and there was an entrepreneur present to do what was necessary and had he not stepped in I'm sure someone else might have. But that event was free of constrictions we were just there for the craic, turn up and race what you brung just for the fun of meeting faces we'd only known virtually. It's a shame something similar doesn't happen more frequently, sort of Custom Open Boat meet .
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