bearings, spine tubes, rudders and foil tips, along with wing control systems, fairings, hydraulic pump boxes, tubes and accumulators – even the bicycle set-ups. ‘They started with aluminium bikes and then, when they were happy with all the positioning and ergonomics, we made up the carbon components.’ C-Tech also drew public


when the sail furls and takes a lot of abuse as the sail goes through tacks. Another challenge is that headstay foils are getting smaller, so the sails have to furl ever tighter. You need to find a balance between stiffness and furlability.’ Although inflatable battens are


no longer on the product list the technology has been applied in another superyacht application. Improving on the solid bucket spinnaker snuffer, C-Tech came up with an inflatable ring system: the C-T SnuffAir. The advantages are that, with the snuffer deflated, the huge sails are easier to stow; and when they are hoisted fully inflated the soft structure poses no danger to crew, or to the expensive paintwork of masts, communication domes and so on. Meanwhile, when the America’s


Cup moved to multihulls, C-Tech became even more involved, supplying both Oracle and Alinghi for the 2010 Deed of Gift Match before stepping up a notch for the AC72 cycle in San Francisco, with many of the jib battens and wing components including the control systems and quadrants from C-Tech. For the AC50s in Bermuda the


company’s involvement ramped up yet again, producing complete foil sets for the Emirates Team New Zealand SL33 training catamarans. Work on the AC50s included complex, high-loaded structures such as daggerboard cases,


Above: still lots of careful hand work involved but C-Tech’s modern 2,000m2 factory is a very long way from where the company started out hand-making sail battens 20 years ago. The facility now includes a 600m2 climate controlled clean room as well as an autoclave (left) large enough to cook foils and components ranging from Moth wands to hydraulic pump boxes and foil cases for Team New Zealand’s America’s Cup-winning AC50s; C-Tech also supplied many of the key elements of the team’s cyclor and wing-control systems


acknowledgement from team CEO Grant Dalton for delivering under extreme pressure when things went wrong in Bermuda. ETNZ broke a rudder before the Challenger Series began and the C-Tech crew worked night and day for two weeks to get a replacement out to them in record time. ‘That happened again after their


capsize,’ Vallings recalls. ‘There was extensive damage to the fairings and we built another set and also had to replace a cant strut for one of the daggerboards. We worked pretty much non-stop from the Tuesday of the accident. I had a friend who was flying up to Bermuda, so I got him to hand-deliver everything to the team by the Saturday morning in time to go racing again. ‘The work we did with Emirates


Team New Zealand has been good for us – it has put us at the leading edge of foil design and technology. We have been able to apply that experience to other projects. For example, we are currently working on lifting dagger foils for a production 10m catamaran.’ With the 36th America’s Cup


moving to C-Tech’s home ground in Auckland, Vallings envisages yet more work ahead. The return to soft sails takes the game right back into C-Tech’s arena of advanced batten technology and sail hardware. ‘The new capacity that will come with our CNC machine will also expand the range of things we can produce.’ All of which is a long way from


the origins of C-Tech in high performance dinghies and skiffs.


But the company is determined not to stray from its roots. It continues to produce masts, booms, prods, aerofoil hiking wing frames, rudders, dagger boards, wands, battens and components for a wide range of high-performance boats, including the foiling monohull Q23s on Lake Garda, Moths, skiffs (from 12-footers to 18-footers), OK dinghies, Contenders and sport boats. ‘There is always development going on in these classes, some of it involving ultra high-modulus composites,’ says Vallings, who still competes at international level in the 18ft skiff class and this summer won the 12ft skiff Interdominion title. ‘In the Moths we are producing


the new bent booms, where the vang loads at purchases of 54:1 are getting up pretty high. We are seeing loads of over 1.3 tonnes on an 11ft boat, which is asking a lot of the materials. ‘More recently we have brought


some more experience onboard with Tim Willetts, formerly with Southern Spars and Hall Spars, joining us. He has taken our spar building to a new level, with more refined and better build techniques. With masts we tend to stick to our area of special expertise and focus on dinghies, skiffs and sport boats. Probably 35-footers are as big as we want to go at the moment.’ Although it seems there is a


dichotomy between this small boat sailing and the bigger projects, there is in fact considerable cross- over. ‘A lot of the people sailing skiffs and Moths, like Tom Slingsby, Paul Goodison, Peter Burling and so on, are also involved in other high level sailing projects. They know about our precision component manufacture, attention to detail and involvement in the latest materials and systems. Innovation is what we are about – and it is also fun.’ With the company’s roots firmly


in the marine industry, it is also attracting work in a wider field, including communications and aerospace applications. This has led to developing much larger tubes, up to 1.4m in diameter, and represents a potential market for expansion. ‘At the moment the split is about 75 per cent marine and 25 per cent other projects, but we constantly get all kinds of enquiries,’ notes Vallings. ‘Every time the phone rings it is


about some fun project – there are a lot of weird and wonderful ideas out there. It is always exciting and usually firmly within our mission to make cool stuff go fast.’ www.c-tech.co.nz www.sailbattens.com


q SEAHORSE 67


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