Left: the Bieker V3 features a wing angle now increased to 30-degrees to optimise righting moment at the most typical upwind heel angle while the projected ‘hiking edge’ itself has been pushed as far outboard as possible. Clockwise from above: FEA modelling of maximum stresses through the reinforcement laminates of the new Bieker Moth – championship-winning foiler sailor and engineer Scott Babbage now undertakes the great majority of the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and other modelling for the Bieker/Mackay partnership; Babbage again, only this time illustrating the contact pressures between the major fixed elements of the new design; a perfect deck seal has now been achieved with Bieker’s refined upgrades – the area from mast-post aft to end of the deck sweeper has been made flat to allow the sail to fully seal through the complete range of mainsail ease; the new design of mainsheet bridle attachment with the absolute minimum spec lines and fittings delivers faster, more dynamic and more precise mainsail leach control
are willing to take risks on the designs, and one has the best engineering and analysis tools at one’s disposal. Plus of course the necessary financial resources to underpin speedy development. The Bermuda America’s Cup four years
later was another step towards the refine- ment of the foils and the complex elec- tronic and mechanical systems on these high-speed foiling boats. We learned a lot but unfortunately came up short against Emirates Team New Zealand. Following the beating in Bermuda I
found myself at something of a loose end – slightly depressed and a bit burned out but looking for a new challenge. I got lucky again: Australian Scott Babbage came to the rescue before I even left Bermuda by asking me to design the original Bieker Moth. This proved to be great therapy. More than 20 years after I had first seen those Moths on Sydney Harbour I was finally getting a chance to design one! However, by the end of 2022, after five years of getting that first package dialled in
nicely with incremental improvements (a more difficult process than I had originally expected), we were finally up against the limits of what we could do without chang- ing the tooling. At that moment it could be argued that
we still had the fastest Moth on the water but the decision was made to do a deeper revamp of the design following the very light Moth Worlds in Weymouth. The team that would design the new Bieker Moth (BM-V3) was Mackay Boats (builder plus their inhouse design team), Scott Babbage (sailor and technical feed- back), Leopold Fricke and Thomas Hahn (structural engineering)… and myself. Once assembled the team began work on determining exactly where performance gains could be made. However, it did not take me a great deal
of CFD study before I came to the conclu- sion that I still can’t do much better than my original hull shape; so I decided not to revise that part of the package. It is always tempting to make the hull even smaller,
but the existing boat has just enough volume to support the full range of Moth sailor weights so there seemed little point in changing. Our primary focus was then on how to
improve the aerodynamics of the package… and where possible how to reduce weight. Mackay Boats had done a lot of on-the-
water testing with our original Moth design. Using a multitude of telltales liber- ally attached around the hull, deck and lower rig we had learnt that for the most part we had attached flow around the lee- ward bow and hiking racks. This was a surprise to me and it made sense to revise the hiking wing deck shape to accentuate that lift, clean up the aerodynamics and also give a bit more room for the crew as they pass across centreline. Instead of the wing deck being sup-
ported by two identical beams, out of the same mould, I changed the lofting so that the hiking wings are now narrower in plan view outboard, mildly twisted and have now acquired section shapes that will
SEAHORSE 37
SCOTT BABBAGE/JANA MCDIARMID/MACKAY BOATS
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