I have been in sailplane models building when I lived in Bogotá, Colombia in the first half of the 70s. After loosing my job and starting to realize that as being of age 45 I would not get a new job, reason being too old for the job market, I decided to refresh my old hobby, but now adapted to the small budget of money, but rich budget of time. So I decided to build a sail plane from scratch based on a french plan of an A class sailship fro the days when people had the sailboats being operated with no radio control. Having always been more interested in planes, I did have a private pilot license for single engine, I had to dwelf into studying the filed really from scratch!
So the objective of my project was and is, to build a sailboat model capable to navigate a regatta course autonomously. As I did work in the semiconductor and the telecom industries, as many first as an engineer, switching later to sales and then climbing the management career ladder, the project is also my red line to follow and dwelf into any interesting technique I meet in due course. So the way is the objective, not to finish the project. Last year I had the opportunity to live through a stroke, so that the fact that life is not endless suddenly became much more real and in consequence the fact that I might never see the project finished. Realizing this I still stick to my decision, that the way is the goal and not finishing!
The LOA is about 5.57743 foot, at least that is what google computes out of 170 cm! As I want to operate the boat at reasonable winds using the sails of the size given in the plan, i made changes to the hull to implement a better support for large sails, as I might describe on a report from scratch later.
As many of you, I guess, love photos, i was impatient to get a glance as to how the sailboat would look like. Here the photo to close my introduction
Best regards Hellmut