Measurement woes

I visited Ben yesterday, and we broke out copies of the old rules and the most recently updated rules that are being proposed. As most folks know, Ben is a "just build it" guy- he built the boat as close to the plans as he could with no tweaks. His boat is as close as anybody's to the brochure model- it looks like the original i550 with the long cabin and the deck mounted pole. No aggressive rules exploitation, anywhere.

But there are still three current rules that his boat doesn't comply with- it's too wide at the transom since the projected deck point exceeds the max width (this will be true on all boats built to the plans), his forestay attaches "further forward than the stem" (like Andrew's original boat, and two others), and his J is too long since he followed the designer's advice to "hook a tape to the stem" to set his mast placement.

I think the class should be really embarrassed by this. I keep hearing that the rules "are working for us", but it seems that's only true if you don't apply the rules.

Anyway, we tried a couple other ways of measuring the hull shape. I brought the transom jig that I made and it worked well on his boat too. He had a thick build up of tape under the transom center, but was still in compliance with the proposed rules. His other dimensions are right in the center of the tolerances for the proposed rules.

There's one other method of doing the beam/freeboards that I've been working on for the angle/template phobic, where beam is done to the actual boat, and freeboard (only) is done to the projected deck/hull planes, and from the hull bottom instead of chine. I was able to verify that another (besides my own) boat built to the plans has the tolerances centered on the actual boat's dimension. Which is good.

Since Ben built from tyvek patterns and still had them, I asked if we could lay the hull side panel pattern over his boat. I had the idea that this was a way of checking for gross changes to the hull shape, and it does. Ben cut his panels carefully, and joined them accurately- when the pattern is lined up just above the chine, it's easy to see the uniform reveal between the pattern and the chine- they follow parallel paths as you would expect. So in my opinion, this could be a valid way to check for large, deliberate alterations to the hull panels that violate the "from the plans" clauses in the old or new rules- sort of the equivalent of a RRS rule 2 violation. Since it made a fun pic, here's Ben's newly tyvek-sponsored boat:

And a little later we headed to the local lake for some uber-light air sailing, max 5 knots, maybe. Still a productive, fun day. We played with rig tune a little, and found some things for Ben to improve on the boat and trailer- this was only the third time he had been out. We managed to sky the main halyard for lack of a stopper knot, and leave the beer back at the house. Oops.

Progress has been made on my boat- I've finished the cabin mold and added about half of the foam. I'll post some pics in the next few days, once all the foam is on.