Well, I haven’t exactly got this boat foiling, but I have finished it off and added a more interesting wing sail. To begin with, here is an example of the boat sailing with the wings I have been making to date. These have a single piece front element which are not particularly thick airfoils. Thinner profiles are easier to make with Depron. They have a number of flaps, either flat pieces of foam, or airfoils, which allow some twist to be introduced to the sail:
Watching the AC72s, I’ve been impressed by the amount of twist in the ETNZ front element. I also wanted to try a thicker profile. Below is a short video of the latest wing I have been testing. This is based on the ETNZ wing with the front element having a thickness of 40% of the chord length. The front element is divided into four sections that can rotate relative to one another. Only the bottom section is attached to the mast. This arrangement creates some twist in the front element, which the slow motion sections of the video try to demonstrate.
Nice Plate, but should not the end plate be at the Bottom of the wing??? LOL
MY development schedule is mold hulls and foils in October - November, rig in January and February along with building 1 m Soling and be ready to sail in March so I will default to the tennis ball can for my Initial float!
No wing sail to start, Probably one piece sleeve at about 40% of cord to keep it simple at first. Foil development first. Although that is almost a wing sail.
Love your rotating foils on RC-network, need more wind bur you can see the leeway stop when you rotate them. You and Chris are the most prolific builders I have come across, I am in awe!
I’m still tinkering with this boat. A few months back I tried sailing it against some monohulls and the inability to point was really apparent. I know this is to be expected for multis, but it was particularly bad for this boat. I went back and compared the different iterations of the wing and it appeared that with the original wing, which had a high aspect ratio, the boat pointed significantly better. To test this I’ve modified the two wings I have used with this boat (one with a thick front element and the other with a thin front element) to be narrower and taller. For the thiner of the two I also reintroduced a gap between the front and rear elements. With both wings the boat sail much better than the previous iterations. However, too complicate things I also added a surface on the deck like the AC72s, so it is bit hard to draw firm conclusions. However, the boat seemed to sail much better than the previous iterations. I even managed to fly the main hull without pitch-poling a couple of times:
For a better comparison of performance of wings with thick and thin front elements I plan to try to make the two wings as similar as possible, with airfoil flaps and a gap between the flaps and the front element (currently only the thin one has these).
A few more minor tweaks and I think that I will be happy with this boat.
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