Russell Brown

Everyone has plusses and minuses, good points and bad points, strengths and weaknesses. I haven't seen your good side yet, Jammer. What have you contributed?

My knees are still recovering from pedaling the G-32, probably from having too big a prop, but my wrists are not up to rowing either. What kind of autopilot? Let me know if you need anything I might have.

Right on Norse! What are you going to sail? I'm not doing it again and I hope somebody will go for the solo record. It will take better breeze or someone with more stamina than I have. Maybe you. I'm still trying to figure out what to do with myself that will fill the void of all that sailing, but cruising does it for me too. Will you have a pedal drive?

That Faversham stove looks good. It probably has similar firebox size to the Dickinson, but would radiate heat better. I prefer having the chimney coming out of the top of the stove as in the Dickinson, instead of the back, but I'd like to see the Faversham.

Don't forget the Dickinson solid fuel stove. I have used one extensively on a small sailboat and really liked it. They are nicely made from stainless and light, about 10 pounds. I think they are attractive and relatively affordable. All of the related parts (pipe, deck fitting, charlie noble, etc are affordable and nicely made. More appropriate for smaller boats, I think. They are made near Vancouver.

Hobot, This is the most interesting thread on Sailing Anarchy. I hope it continues....

I had experience with the line-drive system with the original rig. It worked, but pushed the bolt rope aft because of the width of the disks and rope trough. My boom has a flange similar to the disks but smaller. The laminate mainsail that I'm using is very stiff and not happy when wrinkles are introduced. I have experimented with padding on the boom to take up some of the draft of the sail and I can keep most of the sail wrinkle free, but I'm still not convinced that the roller furling/reefing is the way to go. I didn't even mention the pins falling out of my universal joint.

I did the around the boom furling on the new rig for my G-32. I learned a lot about the system from the old rig, which also had the around the boom furling and I thought that I could really make the new system perfect. The trailing edge of the mast was cut away to allow room for the universal joint and have the luff able to be a straight line between the bolt rope track and the boom. The system is really great most of the time. I can reef (even using an outhaul) in seconds and putting the sail up or down is really easy. The scary part is having the luff of the sail walk forward and bunch up against the mast to the point where the whole thing binds. This happens at the worst of times, when it's really blowing. The sail reefs perfectly if it is not drawing, like when the jib is sheeted and the helm is down to keep the nose up. The trouble happens when it's blowing hard enough that the jib is rolled up and the main needs to be reefed more. The sail walks forward because there's no way to take all of the pressure out of it while rolling it on to the boom. I had one really scary incident that has taken the joy out of the system for me.

This would make a lousy powerboat and it wouldn't go 30 knots no matter how much horsepower you used. It would probably go about 10 knots with 10 horsepower, but to go faster it would need very different hull shapes. It probably has real value and it's a beautiful boat with pedigree, so ruining it would be sad.

Hi Kubark, I recently got to look closely at an F-27 rudder and I think that the geometry and case are quite well thought out. I have quite a bit of kick-up rudder design experience and I just built the set shown in the photo. Aluminum plate walls, bolts, and spacers make quite a bit of sense for the purpose. There are a few different loads in kick-up rudder cases and some of them are difficult to address with composites. Cassette style rudders less so, because it's easier to keep the walls of the case from being forced apart.

Thanks for the education Ishmael. I never knew. I have used 35 mm to take photos that were used to scale from and found it to be fairly accurate, but I really don't know what I'm talking about. Do you know what focal length a go-pro is?

Wide angle lenses make a boat look fat. Lots of people these days like to use Go Pro's, which have extremely wide angle lenses. There are cool things about them, like you can see everything from 5 feet away and you don't have to worry about shaking the camera, but they also lie about things like proportion and speed. So many onboard sailing videos where a boat looks like it is really ripping were taken with Go Pro's. In some of them the boat really was ripping, but not nearly as much as the video shows. If you think I'm full of it, try zooming in and out while looking aft with a "real" camera. Did the drone use a Go Pro? If so, do Bob a favor and take a photo with something closer to the human eye. About 35 mm, I think.

I can very much relate to what you are talking about with "breaking free" and I like your analogies. I't's much more of a phenomena with the F-series tri's than with narrower hulls (such as my G-32 cat). The fatter hulls are definitely feeling hull speed until they break free. I'm a plywood boy too. Are we related?

I would like to say that I have very much respect for the editor's public stance on environmental and political issues. It takes balls to say it how you see it.

That looks like a Newick, but it's a Walter Green design. There's a sistership in your neck of the woods named Humdinger that is about to be put on the market. I rebuilt it and built a wing mast for it some years ago. One of my best times ever was delivering that boat to SF. it's like riding a big bird out in the ocean. We got to the bay and spent the afternoon bombing around because we weren't ready to stop sailing and hand the boat over. Is anyone familiar with Humdinger?