Design
One issue at a time
(Almost) everyone’s excited about wings, but there are still relatively few with either the interest or the resources to give serious attention to blending all that performance potential with considerations of wider usage. Seahorse has a lot of good stuff in the pipeline in the coming months looking at initiatives large (some very large) and small to bring wings ‘to the people’. This month we are in Bristol, Rhode Island – still a US technology hub for performance sailing
The Trident Bristol, Rhode Island has always a been special place for the yacht- ing industry. This area alone has produced more America’s Cup winners than any other country. Tommy Gonzalez and his young company Fast Forward Composites continue the tradition. There will be many Seahorse readers for whom Tommy needs
little introduction – a passionate sailor with over 150,000 sea miles on high-performance multihulls, including The Race 2000 around the world on the 100ft cat Team Adventure with Cam Lewis. He then slowed down a little to project-manage and/or skipper a string of large cats before overseeing the design and build in South Africa of the giant but unexpectedly challenging Gunboat 90 project. Off the water Gonzalez launched the music start-up label Caliente – which has since taken three Grammies. A man of many talents. Now Gonzalez is back in design mode, with Trident his latest
project. A trident is of course a spear with three prongs: in this case wing, boat and foils, each with its own design prerequisites: l Wing: but a rig that will be user-friendly for cruising sailors. l Boat: initially a catamaran for day/weekend sailing that will be driven by the wing rig. l Foils: create a foiling system that is reliable and more user-friendly than anything currently available.
The wing Gonzalez has spent considerable time studying ways in which the technology in C-Class and America’s Cup cats can be applied in a practical way to cruising catamarans.
48 SEAHORSE The two-flap wing in these classes requires too much area and
can’t be reefed in a blow… so that was out. The logical next step is the sail-plus-wing seen in early C-Class cats of the 1960s and early 70s. But while these sail/wing systems meant a relatively small compromise (for the time) in all-out performance, the practical problems remained. With the benefit of modern technology and materials, however, this solution still offered potential. First problem: what do you do with a stayed wing in a slip or at
a mooring when the wind swings and blows as it chooses? It was clear that even a narrow ‘leading-edge’ wing needs to feather freely if it is ever to be left unattended. Conventional three-point staying was out of the question: on a good day such a rig can deliver a maximum of +/–600
rotation. The solution presented itself in 2013 during a social hook-up in
St John, US Virgin Islands, with multiple Tornado champion Randy Smyth. ‘Sitting out on the balcony,’ Tommy recalls, ‘Randy and I came up with the bones of a solution: have the mast only supported by a rotating three-shroud masthead tang. A single set of shrouds arranged in a typical 600
tripod array would be mounted to a three-
spoked masthead yoke with the spokes long enough to enable the wing to rotate 3600
beneath it.’ The first trial would be with a wing of around 50% the chord of
the rig – wing plus soft sail. The sail would be hoistable, and so fulfil their desire to – initially at least – mimic the early C-Class wing- sail systems. When the sail was down it would detach completely from the mast, allowing full rotation. There would be a simple main- sheet system intuitive to all sailors. The side loads on the mast would obviously be higher if only supported at the masthead, which would bring inevitable bearing issues for the masthead shroud tang, but these did not look insurmountable using 2017 technology.
Proof of concept Smyth’s existing 20ft distance race-winning cat Scissor would be the first test-bed. The first wing was built quietly in a rented space in Bristol. Gonzalez and Smyth were without engineering help so
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