The trailer alone is wort it
https://orangecounty.craigslist.org/boa/6201043500.html
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John Schwartz
Ventura, CA
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Cheap Tornado
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Posted: Jul 02, 2017 - 08:26 AM
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Posted: Jul 02, 2017 - 09:20 AM
That looks like a Nacra Inter 20 mast? Too white to be an aluminum rig. I agree the cover and trailer are worth it. Word of caution however, tilt trailers tow poorly, even with the tramp removed. We are going back to breaking the boat down completely as a result, making weekend events a little impractical. I see now why the Tornado never really took off. It's otherwise a phenomenal boat to sail. Speed comes easily. -
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Posted: Jul 03, 2017 - 09:15 PM
That is a pretty nice looking trailer. I agree that it looks like an I20 stick, but I do not see a spin hoist point on it as you might expect for a retro-fit. Not much bend in it either, maybe more likely a white AL stick.
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Greenville SC
Offering sails and other go fast parts for A-class catamarans
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Posted: Jul 05, 2017 - 09:29 AM
"in the Olympic Games from 1976 through 2008" ...
active Tornado class still in many countries ...
I wouldn't say "this never took off" - but i certainly agree it is not a cat for the typical weekend sailor
funny that they don't show any pics of the boat sans cover
Edited by MN3 on Jul 05, 2017 - 09:30 AM. -
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Posted: Jul 05, 2017 - 03:06 PM
There are decent fleet sizes of Tornados in various parts of the world (Greece, Germany, Australia, perhaps Italy and the U.K), but when you look at these compared with the number of years the boat was produced, in all reality the numbers aren't very high. The class was fueled by its status as an Olympic class. After that era ended, it virtually imploded, with most of the top of the fleet moving to the F18. Many still kept there Tornados, and you would be hard pressed to find a better built boat than a Marstrom Tornado, nor a better sailing boat than a spin rigged T. They are truly fantastic boats and surprisingly quick (we clocked 19 kts sitting on the hull eating sandwich's while 2 sail reaching on a delivery sail). The headache of the 10' beam however makes the boats less practical as a travel boat than anything with an 8' beam. I'm just warning that the tilt trailer doesn't actually solve this issue, which is why many in the class never bothered with them. -
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Posted: Jul 05, 2017 - 03:09 PM
totally agree
we lost a sailor locally due to his 10'wide mystere and the hassles of rigging and dealing w his tilt trailer -
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Posted: Jul 08, 2017 - 01:56 AM
MN3, SamC: Out of curiosity, what exactly makes the tilt trailer so much of a hassle? I've never used one but was looking at a Tornado a while back and the seller showed me how it tilted. It didn't seem all that much extra work or time to tilt up/down (at first glance) -- it seemed like with a regular trailer, you'd derig, pull the boat up on the trailer, lash it down, then tilt. What exactly am I missing that makes it harder with the tilt trailer? (I love the idea of 10ft beam)
Definitely the towing part itself seems more hairy with the tilt trailer -- I can see how any strong cross wind or route with height restrictions would cause much more problems for a tilt trailer.
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SL
Nacra Inter 20 (sold)
2017 Race to Alaska "Team Ketch me if u can"
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Sausalito CA
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Posted: Jul 08, 2017 - 02:05 PM
I've traveled from Ca to Michigan & back, as well as LaPaz & back (1000 mi) & never had a problem. The minor hassle of tilt trailer doesn't begin to compare to the ride of the 10' boat. Sold my Marstrom, but still have a beautiful woodie on tilt. Pete -
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Posted: Jul 08, 2017 - 08:45 PM
Tilting the trailer isn't terrible if you have help, or a hydraulic system. But now your boat requires a ladder to reach it.
With our particular trailer, it's downright squirrelly driving and a huge hassle. It also turns out they don't trim the trees on the east coast, so you whack a lot of branches which isn't good. Removing the tramp helps some but not much. Other tilt trailer owners have said the same thing. I would be curious about Petes exact setup, as ours isn't going to work for trips over an hour. I won't argue with the 10' beam, but imo Marstrom could have added a few more feet of mast when they went to the carbon stick. The Tornado mast is shorter than the Inter 20 mast, and about the same height as the F18 stick. It's plenty fast once you are wired up but a little lacking in under 10 kts of breeze. The F20carbon is running a 36' stick IIRC and is pretty similar in overall dimensions otherwise to the Tornado. -
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Posted: Jul 09, 2017 - 01:51 PM
I use 4 garage door springs & my daughter & I (age 80) can easily raise or lower it. Has old 8" tires, but if were to travel any great distance, would put on wider new tires. Years ago on a trip to LaPaz, one wheel was out of alignment and finally wore down. Spare did the same. So I took last wheel off & hid behind an old cactus. Drove remaining 500 miles, took care of some windsurfing customers (had camp at La Ventana), flew back to L.A. & started again with my Jeep knowing I would find it anywhere in the peninsula. Hey, I had a Jeep! Found it at Federal pen (they drove it 50 miles on rims), put new tires on & continued on to LaPaz after paying Feds $80. In the city center in LaPaz we can keep cats on the sandy beach year around no charge. Ocassionally we get graffiti inside of hull sides from sleeping transients, but sailing there is primo. Pete -
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Posted: Jul 10, 2017 - 08:14 AM
The local who had a 10' mystere purchased the boat with a pretty crappy tilt trailer - needed lots of attention
when it finally failed, he tried to copy Mike Krantz beautiful tilt trailer with shocks to help lift/lower the tilt.
He built it using the old trailer and it ended up being the perfectly wrong setup
rollers were too high off the ground making getting it on and off the trailer a lot harder
the shocks were great but not exactly perfect - so the last few inches of needed were not aided by the shock, so the guy had to lift about 60% of the weight to get the supports in/out - looked like a hernia waiting to happen
it was so much extra work that he gave up and quit sailing
(rigging this big boat was also part of the issue - if you have dedicated crew / and or the RIGHT tilt trailer it would have been a different story -
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Posted: Jul 10, 2017 - 05:49 PM
What Sam said is pretty much spot on and aligns with our observations.
We don't tow more than an hour or so with a tilt trailer for a couple of reasons; fuel economy sucks, it can get swirly when it gets windy and it's hard on the boat. When you take the tramp off to make it more stable, the boat loses a lot of its stiffness, so racking is worse. Think about how many times you hit a bump going down the road, the boat is going to flex just a little every time.
Putting it on and off the trailer isn't bad so long as your trailer isn't too tall and the tilt mechanism works correctly. However when you want to put the cover on, take the cover off, get to some hardware, etc. you have to either get out a ladder, or drop it down.
Don't get me wrong, a good tilt trailer is awesome and saves 60-90 minutes rigging and de-rigging. If I'm going to have to remove the tramp, going the extra step and pulling the beams isn't but another 10 minutes or so. To fully remove the tramp requires removal of hardware that would take longer than just pulling the beam bolts; I'd rather do that than have my tramp wrapped around the beam and flopping in the wind while driving down the highway. My boat has never to my knowledge been on a tilt trailer and I think that is a good thing.
Honestly though, this is part of the reason that I just sold my T. I LOVE the boat and have yet to find something that drives as nicely, but when you watch F18's show up after you and are ready to sail before you are... and the same thing happens when breaking down, your wife says, "let's get something easier" and she is right in our case... well, and our team has other reasons for freeing up the slot for a different boat
Regarding more mast on the T; that's an interesting subject. We've put an M20 mast on the T and it works well, with some caveats. First, the boat just doesn't have enough board to offset the additional sail area when in light conditions. Once the breeze is up a little, it does well, but it exaggerates the need to foot on the T even more than on the stock sport rig. I've designed and partially built a drop in insert so that you can use daggers to alleviate this problem, but have not finished or tested them. Since I've sold the boat, doubt that I'll continue forward, but who knows.
The other problem is the lack of forward buoyancy; in the 2016 FL300, we couldn't push as hard as we needed to. In 2017, we ran the boat with small t-foils on the rudders and it made a HUGE difference in stability and surviveability.... until we broke a rudder.
I guess one additional problem is the lack of adoption of SCHRS in the US; people/organizers/USSA are stuck on the old, DEAD DP-N system where modifiers have no base in reality. Racing in what we called the "big rig" configuration caused problems where we would be given an unrealistic rating that the boat could never meet. I mean, really, we owed the N20c time!
Edited by wlrottge on Jul 10, 2017 - 05:50 PM. -
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Posted: Jul 11, 2017 - 11:19 AM
Pete,
Is this thing on its way to Big Bear yet?
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John Schwartz
Ventura, CA
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Posted: Jul 11, 2017 - 11:44 AM
Not for lack to trying... I pushed for this a while back with our race series. The issue is the franken-boats but more so many sailors updating to modern sail plans.. If SCHRS wants to succeed there needs to be more education, area referees and measureres, but more important get the sail makers to automatically provide a measurement data sheet that will satisfy what SCHRS is asking for when people get new sails... this seems to be the biggest hurdle.
I had asked one very well known sailmaker for this recently that proclaims to have all sails built with computer aided technology and the request was turned down... how hard would this request be if the information is already there????
Edited by JohnES on Jul 11, 2017 - 11:45 AM.
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John Schwartz
Ventura, CA
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Posted: Jul 12, 2017 - 11:40 AM
Interesting John. The only thing you need to update or make a new SCHRS rating is the sail area and mast area. Luff length on the jib and possibly mast height come into play, these are easy things to provide!!
We have been using SCHRS regularly at most events on the East Coast, certainly all that I am involved with hosting! I'll admit though that I preferred the old ratings where the A-Cat, F16 and F18 all rated reasonably close (within 0.002). In actual experience I found this to match reality across a range of conditions. They've since moved the F16 rating into the stratosphere; the F16 now rates 1.028 in doublehanded configuration and 1.041 in singlehanded?? For a boat that touts equal racing 1 up or 2 up that is a huge delta in rating. Further, we had Matt and Gina McDonald on their well tuned Falcon F16 racing against the F18 fleet at Tradewinds a few years ago and they were trading tacks and gybes with the F18 fleet. The boats aren't that dissimilar, and only in the breeze does the length and volume of the F18 makeup for the weight. In flat water light air conditions the F16 is equal and possibly faster than the F18, this is not reflected by the ratings. It also sucks when the fleet falls into a hole and no one is moving but you are sitting there owing time to your competition, but no rating system accounts for that! -
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Posted: Jul 12, 2017 - 08:23 PM
We switched over to an old Trailex tilt trailer for the T last year. It has no lift assistance and is no issue for 2
people to tilt the boat. I can do it alone with a bit of effort. Probably put a spring on it sometime but not in a rush. So far we have only made trips of a little over an hour. Last time it was pretty gusty so we chose to take slower back roads. It does move around a bit. I mounted a really heavy sail tube very low on the trailer and plan to add another to keep the weight low. The T is so light that getting it on the trailer is easy. Ours tilts with the high side away from the curb so trees are never an issue. I have seen trailers that tilt the other way.
Not sure why an F18 would be so much faster to rig than a T on a tilt? We can rig as fast as most.
Sailing a 300 pound boat with a 10 foot beam in heavy air is just awesome.
Pete
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Pete Knapp
Schodack landing,NY
Goodall Viper,AHPC Viper,Nacra I20
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Posted: Jul 13, 2017 - 04:48 PM
[quote=samc99us]Interesting John. The only thing you need to update or make a new SCHRS rating is the sail area and mast area. Luff length on the jib and possibly mast height come into play, these are easy things to provide!!
[quote]
I agree, they have some very detailed measurement info on their website for many of the production "stock" boats. All I need is the new sail (CM) measurement info and I can plug in the rest...
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John Schwartz
Ventura, CA
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Posted: Jul 13, 2017 - 05:15 PM
Well, I design my sails with a super-duper computer program that gives an exact area down to the MM^2. I learned (the hard way) that these numbers have little relationship to the numbers that we get when sails are measured to class rules. Unfortunately this resulted in taking some shears to some brand new sails at the last nationals. Lesson learned, the outline of the new design gets taped onto the table and measured before a new sail is built (when class rules matter).
Measuring a sail is not a huge job, but requires some space and a helper.
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Greenville SC
Offering sails and other go fast parts for A-class catamarans
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Posted: Jul 14, 2017 - 01:49 PM
Bach,
I'm a bit confused as to how the issue you are describing would happen? There is always room for error between software and the real world, but it sounds like your software is measuring the 3D area of the sail and in the real world we are doing a 2D panel measurement? The 2D measurement could be larger as when you stretch a curve flat you get some additional length. I'm just trying to understand the problem.
-Sam
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