Boulevard of broken dreams – Part II
Peter Harken continues the extraordinary story of an engineering journey that began with the fall of Singapore and continues to this day forward. But not everything the two brothers tried turned out to be magic…
Seahorse: You mentioned last time that along the way you’ve had a few hiccups. Peter Harken: Yes… like the time we came up with the foil for a windsurfer about 30 years ago. It was a foil that you mount in a windsurfer centreboard slot, made from aluminium extrusions so you could quickly put it together and it was relatively inexpensive. You had to get it out in at least 3ft of
water to get on it and go. And it was fairly difficult to handle because we didn’t have any control mechanism, it was just the wind and the foil controlling speed. You had to do a kind of up-and-down motion to make it work, quickly and repeatedly
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trimming the sail in and out. I could do the 100-yard dash with that thing but then crashed every time. Well, we made it for fast production
and easy to assemble and spent a bunch of money on the project. We thought it was going to be the greatest bloody invention going in windsurfing and everybody was going to buy one – but the whole of the rest of the world didn’t agree with us (laughter). Because it really was too diffi- cult in most cases to handle, especially for the general windsurfer. And so we put that into the boulevard of broken dreams too. I guess we were just 30 years too damn soon with the thing. SH: But foiling has brought a whole new area of business… PH: Yeah, foiling has become the next go-fast addition to many types of sail- boats, as we all know. In some ways the foiling phenomenon led us into very fast hydraulic systems for controlling the movement of the foils. It was especially true in the last America’s Cup. They came to us asking to bring those big foils up and down in a couple of seconds so we had to create systems and cylinders that would act at that kind of speed – and they had to be very light. There aren’t really hydraulic cylinders and systems that you can buy
off the shelf that are made to do that sort of thing so in most cases we had to start from scratch. This is a new need and it’s part of our
culture to attack new things. It’s another result of the trickledown products we get from our involvement in the Cup pro- grammes and it means hydraulics are now a major department in our company. It’s different from industrial hydraulics, we had to design systems that were manually powered rather than motor driven… which is a whole other ball game. SH: And next… PH: I’d say the big attack on hydraulics is one of the ‘next’ because we are putting a lot more engineering effort into it. Another ‘what’s next’ is our push into soft attach- ments. This is not our invention so we take no credit there – it’s just the next big push into reducing weight from metal shackles, cleats, pad eyes and so on, plus the flexibil- ity in terms of movement. We just teamed up with a small Estonian company, very very good guys called Ropeye who make some really slick soft attachments. SH: Pneumatics? Has it got a future? PH: Air power? Good one, Andrew. I don’t know. I think they’re beginning to use it in soft wing sails, blowing them up into sort of a collapsible ‘hard’ wing. But I don’t think it
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