Closing In

Well it has been a great summer here for sailboarding. As always I am torn between finalising the longboard design and beginning construction, and doing some sailboarding on the bay and building some fitness. In fact the latter has won out the last few weeks- I've started racing the venerable Tiga around the course with the dinghy's at Elwood- great fun except that- boy are those running legs are a pain in the bum when the sea is sloppy and the wind is too light to make it worth tacking downwind. Still sailing the Tiga is good training as it is a relatively narrow board and so mastering the transitions (and sailing directly downwind) is good practise for racing the longboard (bit like limbering up with a weighted baseball bat before going out to face the music on the diamond.

Nevertheless, I have still been making progress with the construction table now completed and levelled as shown above plus I've put together some data on the relative location of the components on a longboard. This is shown in the plots below where the normalised distance of each component from the board has been plotted for three different longboards and the Tiga. 

First of all it can be seen that there is a reasonable degree of consistency between the boards in terms of where each component is located. For example it can be seen that the fin is typically located about 5% of the board length forward from the tail; the downwind/reaching centre strap is about 7% forward of the tail/ the centreboard pivot point is about 35% forward; and the mast track extends from about 40% to 55-60% forward of the stern.

So this is all good news. I have now have consistent models for board rocker, board plan view, board thickness and component location. Finalisation of the design is now very close.

And finally, my kids are getting in on the act now too. The attached clip shows my oldest son working hard to wreck the Elwood boating pier.

All the best- Martin