Okay I'm relaxed now !

I agree your post had something of a red flag effect on me.


>>The Marstrom A-cat has bolted beams today and we where having a discussion with Marstrom what we could do to reduce the price on the a-cat. He said that removing the bolted beam and going for glued beams instead would be a significant price and weight reduction. The increased stiffness would be hard to measure since the current design for the bolts is really good, and expensive....

Noted .

>>So for the current Marstrom platform it would reduce the price! By putting a ban on glued beams you could make some designs more expensive!


Well, this is somewhat of a weird swing of looking at things. Current prices will of course not rise because it is discovered now that glueing may be cheaper. That would be weird. Also we are still faced with the issue that current use of Alu beams are a shitload less expensive than the use of carbon beams that would be required if you want to glue in the beams. So you could save money only after you spend teh same amount first in order to be able to safe it.

Well at least the builders currently involved in the F16 class didn't feel that either carbon beams or glued in beams is attractive to them from a cost reduction or production perspective. Now if Marstrom gets into the F16 class and shows us all how it can be done and for less investment than we may have something to talk about. However I trust this to be an idle hope as I fear Goran feels that our minimum weight of 107 kg is too high for our 5 mtr length.


>>Reducing beam was not really serious, but it is only 8% beam reduction I was talking about... You would only sacrifice some upwind speed, downwind speed would NOT suffer. But the boat would still be messy to fit into a container....


8 % indeed but also 3 % less upwind speed in singlehanded mode. Not to mention a more roomy tramp when double handing. It is funny really but that 8% does really make a difference in feel.


>>The F18 guys are actually arguing about the beam of 2.6 meters. You need tilt trailer or knocking the boat apart each time you trailer it or you may run into to trouble. Ok must sailors don't care about the extra width and trailer it anyway, but why having 0.1 meters extra that makes it so difficult.

That is why we are at 2.5 mtr width.

Wouter