Well today is your lucky day. We're having a big huck out down at the Object 2 skiffworks shop and making some room for new projects and as such we're selling the molds for the 2007 Little America's Cup winner, Alpha for whom ever is prepared to come and get them in the next two weeks.
Blunted,
I saw both you and Fred in Newport during the last I4C. I do not remeber if I introduced myself then, but we spoke about all of your boats and wings. Alpha is a great platform. My questions are: Are you selling the molds to make room to build another boat to replace Caanan or modify it for the next I4C? How is the next I4C shaping up as far as competitors are going? I know that there is an Italian campaign, L'Hydroptere looks like they are building one to two boats, I believe the French are still planning to compete, Inviticus is hosting the event and Steve is bringing at least one boat, With Fred and you attending, who else is interested? Has Alpha been sold or are you selling it at all? And last of all, for someone who chooses to purchsae the Alpha molds, what would it take to build a boat and wing as well as campaign it for a series? Thanks for your response and I apologize for all of the questiions. TTS
TTS, I'll do my best.
You know about as much as I do on who will be there next year. We'll be there, likely with 2 boats, yet to be determined which ones.
Steve has threatened to field a two boat team, which would be great, but also challenging as we all know. Even to show up with one platform and two wings would be great for Steve and I hope he can do that much for all of our sakes.
The British team, well we know that rounding up dollars is no party right now and we know they made their wing a two part affair last year and they have some hurdles to overcome there, 14 months off, so we'll see what transpires for them.
The Italians. Well again, you know as much about them as I and the rest of anarchy do, likewise for the Swiss and French teams.
Why sell the Alpha molds? Well, in a confined shop there is only so much room and if we were to build another platform, we would likely prefer Canaan to Alpha. There's not much between them in design and performance but if we had to choose, she is the prettier sister I think. That's not to take away from Alpha, it's a great platform and we always enjoy sailing that boat. Each of the boats has their own unique characteristics and she is a fine vessel.
As for Alpha, no she is not sold nor will she be I imagine. Fred rather likes her. In fact she's starting to come to the island this week for training purposes, wing first.
So to build a boat and campaign a boat? Well, in our experience most people who want to get into the class figure they are pretty clever, more so then us, so they usually want to build their own design of wing. So you would have to build tooling at the very least for the Leading edge.you could get away with building almost everything else out of water jet cut flat plate parts in a pinch. If you follow the contemporary path, you'd need a 35' long tube of carbon as well, preferably made of high-mod. To put it in context, last year Rob and I priced out building an Alpha wing for another team and optimistically it would be $130K and about two to three months to build it. Keep in mind that's using existing tooling and buying a big stick from Ben Hall. (Included in that price), about half of that was labor.
Now you'd also want to build a set of beams. You could take the SHC approach and order up some CST tube, do some cutting, gluing, taping, sanding and painting, and you'd have some economical beams for less that $10K
Then you're on to foils. so you'd need one rudder tool, and one dagger foil tool if you do it right. Perhaps the guys in Ottawa at Phil's Foils and partners could get you a full set for about 12K, but I have no idea. We use high mod on our foils to keep stiff, thin, and light. You can always throw more regular mod at the problem.
Now to run the show... We would strongly suggest a tent or a hanger of you can swing it and almost certainly some kind of tender to follow you around and pick up the pieces when required. The Poms are pretty good at working without a tent, but they have a design build hanger facility, which you really do need.
In short, there is a ton of labor involved in building and running the campaign. You can get volunteers or you can pay for it, so some mix of the two, each approach has upsides and downsides. Labor makes up the vast majority of the cost, despite what I said about the wing cost estimate.
You could take the other approach, which is to go soft sail. You'd throw more carbon into the platform and the beams, and you'd need someone to build you a nice spar, but perhaps a Seacart rig would do the trick. Then you pay for actual cloth sails. I imagine you'd save a ton of money this way and get a lot of the fun of sailing C-cats. no hangar required you could likely skip the tender too.
Hope this answers some questions for you.
Dream big, go for it.
B
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