[quote=DamonLinkous][quote=rattlenhum]Damon: You are a saint![/quote]
More :teufel: than saint :lachen:
But I really am interested to see if someone can come up with a homemade beach wheel recipe that would perform the job of the real Cat Trax on soft sand. If I had the money I'd put up a prize like the Jules Verne Trophy awarded to the designer that can come up with a successful recipe.
Trophy Requirements:
1. Cost of ALL parts and pieces involved no more than 50% of equivalent Cat Trax.
2. All materials (parts and pieces) must be commonly available to the public at a hardware store or through online purchase.
3. Time to assemble complete set of wheels from above no more than 8 hours for the average (not professional mechanic) sailor.
4. No special machine tools needed beyond what can reasonably be expected for a sailor to already own. (things like power drill, screw drivers, wrenches, saber saw, tin snips or most hand tools are OK, drill press, table saws, hydraulic press, welding equipment etc. are not)
5. Performance must be on-par with real Cat Trax when used on a 400 pound catamaran on deep soft sand for effort required to roll, loading/unloading, and turn radius.
Here are some issues I see over and over that make homemade designs fail. (there are others)
1. Weight, home built beach wheels tend to either be too fragile or way too heavy.
2. Cost, the rare cases of reasonably performing home made beach wheels cost as much or much more (especially when considering they usually require machine tools) as the much disparaged price of the genuine article.
3. Performance, real Cat Trax beach wheels roll like magic across all surfaces including the deep super soft sugar sand of the gulf coast. I've never seen a pair of homemade wheels that work in deep soft sand. Some work well on asphalt or hard pack sand.[/quote]
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