It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, but I’ve been following the Footy movement from a distance. It seems that pretty much all the Footy’s I’ve seen are of the “traditional” pointy variety. This is all well and good, but I was wondering if anybody had looked at a scow type hull form.
I realize there are disadvantages to any design, but it seems that for a class that doesn’t have a restricted sail area (unless this is old news and there IS now restricted SA) a wide, dished-out scow hull would be a good road to go down. You would be able to take the relatively heavy electronics and spread that over a wide plane, keeping the hull shallow, which would make it a potential surfboard downwind. With a 2-3 inch bow overhang, there would not be too much extra surface area dragging through the water in light wind and you would have a powerful hull form for heavier air sailing.
I’ve also thought about a flat front design, a pram footy. The area to spread out on is still fairly limited though. I currently building a broad bow design, the FatBob. Check it out at FootyUSA yahoo group for more info.
I say “give it a shot”. What’s the worst that can happen? It’ll still be a fun little boat even if it doesn’t perform to world class specifications, whatever those are.
The theory makes sense, Graham, but I’m not sure it will work as well in practice. One concern I have with the scow concept is that it might suffer more in the chop than pointy hulls. Wave action has a proportionally greater effect on Footys than on longer boats. Another is that the submarine effect might actually be worse if the bow goes under. Unfortunately, increasing the flotation of the bow sections hasn’t proven to be as effective as hoped in some other classes in solving the submarine problem. John’s FatBob will be done fairly soon, and maybe we’ll get some indication from that as to where to go.
Then again, we’ll only know for sure if you build your scow…so please do!
i thought about building a scow style footy at one point, and then the submarining tendencys of the class started appearing… now, a scow doesn’t seem like such a hot idea… [think oil tanker =/] besides, it has the potential to be really ugly!
You know what, Footies are so easy to build, just try it! A scow will have it’s own unique handling qualities that just might work better in smaller scale. It is all too easy to sit there and over analyse a design without seeing how it works in reality.
