Pete,

Sailrocket is a rocketship, literally. They have custom foils because they are reaching custom speeds!!! You're not doing anything crazy with your Blade and standard airfoils designed to operate in turbulent flow are fine (NACA series). Others have generated perhaps better for our cats but these aren't freely available.

Rolf,

Good to know, that makes sense, thank you. You pay a little drag penalty going thicker on the NACA foils, but the advantage is a higher stall angle of attack, which is why you want a NACA0012 on the rudder. You should never approach stall with your dagger boards unless you are doing something wrong with boat handling, so the key there is minimizing drag. On a long board, you may select a thicker foil for structural reasons mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

I've come full circle and decided I would rather go sailing than build foils. I don't have time to repair boards because my layup was insufficient, nor do I want to deal with broken foils 30+ miles from my destination. Finally, I have a hard time justifying my materials cost relative to a set of production blades. Mold cost is staggering for the required materials; this is with free CNC time on a $50K+ machine! Carbon alone is $800 for the pair of long dagger boards!

I was hoping to go with asymetric boards, thinking this would actually give me an advantage!

Remember F16 is a developement class and I'm using first generation boards (and case which will not accept the new boards without modification) while third generation are available.

Solo sailing with asym boards is a lot of work in the tacks.

Even double handed I wouldn't want to deal with it. Performance increase is likely mitigated by crew work level.

Is the shape of the Blade foils acceptable?

I am a firm beliver in the KISS principle.

Keep It Simple Stupid.

If so,cruise down to your local locally owned hardware store and get a Layout Comb. You can get the profile of the foil and then lay it out on a piece of sheel metal and cut to shape. This gives you a template to shape your foil to.

There's an idea, hadn't thought of that.

Theres been many a debate on assy foils and many attempts to make them work, but then about 1 sailing season on they seem to be replaced with sym foils. On that basis I wouldn't bother.

I've always wondered that with the slight bit of leeway we get and by consequence the boat is a little " crabbed " as it goes along, if you draw those vectors we can see that the normal dagger board has some angle of attack anyway and is creating lift.

I've recently built a carbon ski bike frame from scratch and designed it to be built as simple as possible so that others can copy it. As part of that I simply laid a number of flat layers of carbon on a table to act as the backbone of the frame. I then glued foam to either side and shaped that to give form and depth. I then laid carbon around the profile to give bending strength to the structure. It seemed quite an elegant way to build a very light but strong frame.

Could we not do the same, just lay x number of layers of carbon onto foam, add another layer of foam and compress. Take the block to the CNC man and cut one side, turn over and cut the other. Layup the outer and job done.

Even better there are a number of shops that will cut wing shapes for model aircraft, get them to cut two halves of a wing and glue that to the carbon centre layers.

I gotta give this a tri!

http://vimeo.com/34164014

Foil "V" shape looks interesting. Might make the form rigid without expensive layups?

That's what a triangle is all about...

damn you, geometry!

What are the standard boards for a blade f16? Mine are similar to those on a taipan

Charles who built your boat, there are quite a few flavours of blade and it may well have taipan boards. For the record the Taipan, Blade and Viper all have the same mast.

I believe my boat is Australian built as I live in Singapore, the hull is kevlar with the short boards

Can there really be a standard board? Since F16 is a developement class the boards can change almost at will.

I prefer to think I have generation 1 boards while others are using generation 3 or higher.

fwiw, my boards extend approx. 21" below the case, and have a chord of about 11 1/2", and are approx. 3/4" thick (that's an eyeball measurement).

It appears to be NACA 0006

does anyone build or sell blade foils these days or are they all home builds?

I'd be surprised if Matt didn't have the moulds

Is there an Australian builder still around? just thinking about shipping costs etc

measure your boards and post here (with a photo) so we can work out if they're taipan boards or not then contact ahpc and order either viper or taipan boards. It would also be worth trying windrush, Brisbane cat centre (nacra) and performance sailcraft ( laser/Capricorn 2) and seeing if they can help.

okay cheers, I'll post the info this weekend after sailing