Veikko Rihu from Provoke has produced these two 1:17-scale radio controlled yachts modeled after Volvo Open 70 boats.
The boats are moulded in carbon and feature a 45-degree canting ballast. Length is 1339mm and beam 350mm. The displacement is 6.3kg with about 4.7kg in the keel, fin, and canting-electronics.
10 boats, including two guest sailors from Russia with Naviga one-metres, completed 12 races in varying no1 rig conditions.
The pictures show some cnc-milled aluminium fittings by Jari Immanen, and Oleg Konka's RUS-32, a Naviga one-metre built by Janus Walicki. Note the rudder. The forward section has an airfoil shape while the aft half of the rudder is a very thin and flexible carbon sheet.
Update: Thanks to Jorma Ojama for sending me some nice pictures from the first six races!
Race 2 of the IOM Nordic Cup (also known as the Scandinavian Cup, although that name is much longer and geographically incorrect) was sailed on 9 Aug 2008 at NJK Björkholmen. Only ten skippers showed up, probably partly because Helsinki/Finland is far away, but also because our own Finnish ranking series has seen a decline in participants this year (could smaller more readily available boats solve this?). 12 races in a shifting westerly wind were completed.
Results on iom-nordic.org
Race 3 of the series will be sailed on 20-21 September in Prestø, Denmark
I follow a number of scientific journals through their RSS feed of new articles. Google-reader makes it easy to stay on top of the 20 or so most interesting journals that each publish maybe 10 papers per week.
But now AIP and their website provider Scitation are messing it all up. They've decided to expand their archives and are putting scanned pdf articles from around 1979-1981 online. The trouble is these papers are showing up as new articles in the RSS feed! Not only that, but the text in the RSS feed shows the papers as appearing now, in 2008. It's only when you click through to the journal homepage that you realize the thing is 20+ years old.
This becomes very frustrating when suddenly APL or Rev.Sci.Instr indicates that they have 200 or more new papers! If they wanted to advertise to the world their 1980s physics they should do it with a different RSS feed.
I've emailed AIP and Scitation about this, but didn't get a reply. If you have the same problem I urge you to also email them and complain!
Update: Thanks to everyone who replied! It's a Grey Heron, Ardea cinerea.
Ilkka (who runs kiteile.com) decided to make a kite-board by infusion moulding. He made 3-4 trials first, and this is the first full-size real kite-board. It's now cured and out of the bag and it looks like everything worked fine.
En motorbåt körde på Skåldö färjans vajer ca 19:30 tiden. Alla ombord verkade ha klarat sig utan större skador och fördes bort med ambulans. Motorbåten satt fast i vajern och brandkår + färj-kapten försökte först få loss båten, men det slutade med att färjan togs loss från vajern och båt+vajer sjönk till bottnen! Färj trafiken löpte normalt igen ca 20:45.
Här en animation där man ser båten sjunka: farjan_animation2 (5 Mb AVI-fil)
With the servo-upgrade of the cnc-mill complete we are now beginning to run the kind of jobs that weren't previously possible. Stepper motors simply don't give the kind of 3D contouring capability and reliability for running 3-4 hour finish jobs like these. The finmould is finished with a 6 mm ball-nose cutter.
Jari made these moulds in steel, but it's possible to cut them in aluminium too. The fin mould here has a NACA 0010 section and the rudder has a thicker NACA 0015 section. With the precision that cnc-cutting provides we hope that the fin can come out of the mould quite complete and fit a cnc-cut finbox/bulb without much manual fitting.
We can produce fin, rudder, and bulb moulds in steel or aluminium on a small scale. Get in touch by email or by commenting below if you are an interested IOM-builder.
