Foiling
sailboat
for the masses
This project was commissioned by a client who wanted an alternative to the expensive foiling sailboats currently on the market. He asked my team if we could come up with a design that would cost about half of the current models.
Through the creative use of inflatable materials and some sacrifices to aerodynamics and weight, we managed to reach our intended cost price and create a first prototype for the client. Twenty weeks of research and prototyping led to the foiler pictured on the left
Learnings
I personally gained a lot of knowledge about CAD modeling in SolidWorks and working with epoxy. During the build of our prototype, I was responsible for the realization of the boat hulls. Below this process is described.
Creation of the hulls
In order to create the boat hulls, an optimal shape had to be found to make them as dynamic as possible while still being relatively cheap to produce. First, several iterations were made as seen in the figure below, and optimized.
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1. The optimized design was milled in several parts from EPS.
2. The EPS parts were glued together with epoxy and covered in fiberglass for strength and water resistance. After this, the whole shape was vacuum formed.
3. After the vacuum forming, the hulls were sanded down and painted. Then they were attached to the boat frame, resulting in the shape seen in the figure on the right.
Components of an existing foiler were added to the shape to create a first visual prototype, which can be seen in the picture at the top of the page.
