With Christmas less than an week away, the deadline for finishing my hydrofoil conversion looms closer every day. Thankfully all but one of the big ticket items is out of the way and I am well and truly into the fiddly stuff. Such as finalising the control rods and rudder gantry.

For the control rods and bellcrank I am using black teflon, and Ronstan PNP 63 sail shackles with the fibreglass rod poked through a hole and then glued in place. (I haven’t fitted the rod yet in these photo’s.) The end of the tiller is cut at the 45 degree angle so I can access the top control rod when I want to remove the tiller. The “business end” of the tiller uses a twist adjuster that I purchased from fastacraft.








The gantry uses 16mm alloy tube, held in place with Kevlar strands, then fibreglassed over the top, then qcells and sanded to finish. I have added an additional strut to the “standard design”, and will be attaching the gantry directly to the wings to minimise load on the hull. I have also designed the gantry so the angle can be easily adjusted without removing it from the boat.

The gantry uses 16mm alloy tube, held in place with Kevlar strands, then fibreglassed over the top, then qcells and sanded to finish. I have added an additional strut to the “standard design”, and will be attaching the gantry directly to the wings to minimise load on the hull. I have also designed the gantry so the angle can be easily adjusted without removing it from the boat.

There was a bit of a saga that occurred on Saturday, when I volunteered to take some photos. Apparently the boat driver got the crazy idea that I had some hidden agenda, and ceremoniously dumped me back on shore.

Anyway, that aside, the badge below should link to a sample of the photos. If you would like a hi-res version of any of the photos, just click on the mail link and drop me a line.

In a vain attempt to assist Luka get some foiling shots for his sponsor, I took some video on the weekend. I exported a couple of frames using iMovie, so I thought I should post them here as well.

I took three days off work last week, as my trusty off-sider (aka dad) was in town to assist with the construction of 2 foils. My mould manufacturer (aka my brother Andrew), has done a superb job to produce a 3 piece mould, using the techniques I discussed here way back in July 2005.

The main changes since July were that due to concern around the strength of the T-join, we decided to make the foils in one piece, and not have to join them together. In addition I decided, at the suggestion of Andrew Stevenson, to add 2, L shaped 3mm stainless steel plates.

Another change is that Andrew added some aluminium strips to the mould, to remove the need to cut the slot in the foil when we were finished moulding.

Making these types of foils is like making stir fry, i.e. most of the effort is in the preparation, cutting everything to shape. We laid it all out on our cloth table, as you can see in these two shots. The second shot shows the balsa core that we glued the plastic tube to for the control rod. For the tube, we used 4mm irrigation upright tube, purchased from Bunnings hardware.

With everything prepared we moved onto the lay-up, starting with a layer of s-glass to make finishing easier, we used about 4 layers of 300gsm carbon uni, then some kevlar pieces, then 2 more layers of carbon, more kevlar, then the aluminium brackets, then along with some chopped strand mat and then the balsa core.

The author mixing some resin, and yes I know my gloves don’t match.







Adding some bog, prior to installing the bracket. Care was taken to ensure that there was no direct carbon to stainless contact.

So after the layup was completed, a ton of bog was added and then the two halves were bolted together. The hydrofoil section was then laid-up and added to the bottom of the mould. After curing for a day, the mould was then opened up and the dags removed from the foil.