Building the OZ PD Racer - now renamed the OzRacer
On another thread or two in the Design forum, there has been a little discussion which it seems may well lead to an attempt to hold the 2007 PDRacer World Championships at the Goolwa Wooden Boat Festival (no one has told the Official Body yet, so let's just keep that as our little secret for now eh?), and of course the Queensland Championships on April Fool's Day have already been announced.
The only snag in all of this, is that to date, as far as we can tell, there are no actual PDRacers in the country, so we (Boatmik and I) have set out to rectify that situation by building a suite of them. OK we're building an identical pair, to the PD(Puddle Duck) Racer design rule, interpreted by Boatmik, with the most important bit, the colour scheme, chosen by yours truly.
(Just to skip forward a bit. This is a video of one of the boats to come from this devlopement in 2010 - it shows a square shaped boat with polytarp sails can sail very well indeed - Brad Hickman sailing in Oklahoma - OK)
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3f7n1IWozg"]YouTube - PDRacer #431 at Lake Eufaula Oklahoma[/ame]
Some of our northern hemisphere compatriots, have produced boats that are mildly efficient. Many are spectacularly economical and simple to construct, although not all could be described as beautiful, and some aren't even handsome.
Our objective is to produce a pair of boats in essentially one weekend, (except for painting), complying with the rule, that will sail efficiently, be reasonably durable, economical (read cheap) and most importantly look reasonably attractive.
We have already given ourselves a bit of a head start, by laminating the foil blanks and chine logs (the bent bits round the bottom of the hull sides), and since we have elected to fully coat the boats in epoxy for durability we will precoat one side at least tomorrow so we can get going.
Once we have proven the construction, Boatmik will offer an "Australianised" metric version of the drawings on his website (free download in keeping with the spirit of the class).
To kick off, below is our budget, and our thoughts on the minimum construction cost might be for a basic boat, we'll tell you how we went in a week or so!
Pic Shows Boatmik hard at work on the new secret keel design (I've seen it, but you lot will have to wait till after we win the cup!).
Cheers,
P
http://www.pdracer.info