Not quite a Moth but offering greater robustness and a lot less complexity and all for half the money, it’s no wonder that Andrew McDougall’s extensively tested and developed Waszps are going out of the door at McConaghy in China as fast as they can finish them. The hollow stem helps to accommodate a wide range of sailor weights without bow-burying. Alloy foils with plug-in tips and a freestanding rig make for a quick to set up and hard to damage package. Many of the components were developed using 3D-printing


designers as the measurers try to plug new loopholes as the designers find them,’ says Ashby. ‘The biggest issue is going to be in monitoring the control systems.’


With the teams drawing on expertise from the edgier regions of aerospace and automation – the clues are in the sponsor lists – one can only assume that the measurers have been schooling themselves in this very complex area. But they will need to be on top of their game if the gamekeepers are to keep up with the poachers. Ivor Wilkins


AUSTRALIA Game-changer


With well over 200 boats delivered and production now at 20 boats per week, Andrew McDougall’s plan to create a foiler for the masses would appear to be working… He spoke to Blue Robinson on the devils and the details Seahorse Magazine: What sort of adjustments have you made since I saw you testing that first Waszp prototype at Black Rock Yacht Club 12 months ago? Andrew McDougall: Well, let me think about what we haven’t changed. We haven’t changed the hull or mast. The boom concept is still the same, though we are now using a different custom boom design. Beyond that, we did play with a lot of things… The sail has gone through a ton of development and there are a lot of smaller areas where we have strengthened things up. SH: Plenty of evolution then… AM: It has been complex. The wing frame got strengthened, the


20 SEAHORSE


wing attachment points were beefed up a lot, and we lengthened the foils by 100mm. If you look at early videos we were foiling quite low because I wanted to keep it easy to walk out into the water with the foils down, but the extra length made a huge difference. We made several variations on wingtips and refined our range, dropping the feather tips mainly due to practical considerations, plus it was going to take a lot of computer time to get those right. They did work, though – we even got a mainsheet jammed in them one day! We ended up with relatively conventional foils, the aft ones plain


and swept back, quite short, the front ones with a little winglet. Our senior engineer, Harry Mighell, did a lot of CFD on the foils, and we learned a lot about them, interestingly about twist. The rear wing tips had a wash-in, rather than wash-out, effect – usually you’d expect the foils to twist away, like mainsail twist, but it ended up going the other way… SH: At all speeds? AM: At all speeds, and the reason was we had a parallel section that was really high lift and were trying to go from that to something that was very non-lifty, while attempting to keep a reasonable pressure distribution. You could wash out and keep a fair bit of lift shape in the foil, or take the lift shape out and wash it in – and it ended up being that, which surprised me a lot. So the front foil is actually quite conventional, coming from a lot of things we’d learnt with the Moth. SH: And the manufacturing process… AM: We were really concerned about shrinkage so we spent a lot of time working on how to employ injection moulding without suffering massive shape deviations. We ended up using ABS thermoplastic


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