Casting Lead

[Port-Na-Storm]

Had an interesting day with CW and some of the DCA yesterday.
Amazingly, no one got hurt.

Find out more over at;

http://port-na-storm.blogspot.co.uk/

[AdrianG]

Oo, my favourite combination, informative and entertaining!

That's quite a lot of lead. Does this foretell of some mega-project?

Kind regards
Adrian

[Chris Waite]

Ho, Mighty A!

Glad you were entertained.  Personally I was near enough to the stuff to be a tad anxious.  But as Grum said, "No deaths and nobody burnded, 'fact nothing to laugh at, at all!"

As for projects; when I were just a lad like, I used to make model sailing boats, occasionally quite experimental:

 





Actually, earlier than that.  Just as I was learning to use a hand-saw, my dear old Dad was building a garage and leaving off-cuts from the rafters.  I would take these remains and cut the opposite side of the angled ends to form a bow then knock nails in for guns and float them in the puddles on the drive.  Rumour has it that at one stage my efforts were so prolific, the parents had to throw them away at night to stop the place filling with rudimentary battleships.

Some of the models, the Thamesey Barge for instance, needed ballast to retain their upright posture (she had lead sheets in the bottom of the hold and laminated into the leeboards) - it was at this stage, I discovered the lead flashing for the roofs on my parents various renovations and conversions.  I have been an avid collector of common-or-garden lead remnants ever since, on the grounds that before long there will be a design pop out of the grey matter; that requires ballast.

So no current project; I was merely trying to rationalize it to a form that did not require half an hour of groping pieces from a couple of grams to tens of kilos in order to move it to its next resting place.  

Having said that, Both 'Tit Willow' and 'Polly Wee':

 

Are half scale proto-types of 'yachts' (for want of a better word), that would require loads of avoirdupois:

 

While it may not be a vast pile of heavy metal, I now have nine ingots, about forty-four pounds a piece, to lay low in whatever ballasted monohull trips off my twitching pencil.

So, how about that?

Gerontius

"Trust in fate, but lean forward, where fate can see you."

[Alan]

I really like the models and would love to know more about the trimaran with four wingsails.
When I was a kid I was aware of racing tri's and decided to convert a Star pond yacht into one, using 1/4" dowel for the outriggers and 1" dowel for the outrigger hulls. I could not understand why it was slower than the original monohull. Now I'm grown up I understand.

[Chris Waite]

Well Alan

My dear old Dad taught me to sail from Hayling Island Sailing Club at the entrance to Chichester Harbour and I remember from quite a young age there being a moderately sized trimaran on the trots having a triple wing sail on a single central pivot arrangement, with a trailing (fourth) vane that when slightly angled, would weather-cock the main wings, thus providing drive.  I cannot find anything online to confirm this entity.

So I engineered a model trimaran to go underneath such an arrangement.  I don't remember if it worked very well and as it was free to rotate, I now realize that the obvious answer is that it would drag the boat round either dead up or down wind, depending on whether it was abaft or ahead of the centre of lateral resistance.

Neither would have made for an ideal angle of attack and I never could afford a radio control "to steer her by".

I did manage a three-foot sailing hydrofoil that frequently suffered the ignominious vagaries of the wind on one of the ponds on Hampstead Heath, until one day I happened to pop it in at one end, whereupon it caught a sudden gust and took off at lightning speed, managing the whole length of the lake on foils, with me sprinting alongside to stop it destroying itself at the other end.

I spent a while as a member of the 'Amateur Yacht Research Society', but modern materials, the expense of building with them, computer programs and the ultimate simplicity of a miniscule surfboard towed by a kite, has made such entities pretty much superfluous....

There, that last should set the cat among the pigeons

And that's about it really

Christo the W