The Taipan 5.7

pic of the boat sailing on its first day

edit, doesn't work to upload from work account, will have to do later

OK, here we go, pics now working

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The boat looks great! What was she like to sail?

The wind was pretty light but some gusts up to 12kts so we were able to test the boat out pretty well. It is very powerful but easily transforms that into forward motion, we didn't use the downhaul all day which was interesting. All the systems worked perfectly which we were happy about considering we had spent so long working on them to make it all streamlined.
Upwind the boat is very well balanced and feels like a light Tornado, there is no noise at all (even less than a Tornado) and the acceleration out of gusts is a bit disconcerting at first, we took a few steps back each time until we got used to it..
Downwind we had a few lee helm issues which are bit shitty to steer with but we are working on that this weekend, I suspect that the rudders are not perfectly alligned which is creating the lee helm downwind (upwind there is no real load but no real feel which indicates that there is a small alignment issue). It is hard to butts the rudder alignment due to the canted hulls..
I am sailing again on Sunday so will have mor einfo next week.

Het Macca, learn how to link the pics in to the posts themselfs, mate !

To bad this baby can't be at Texel. Would be the best proof that selective use of carbon and proper use of plain glass and aluminium will also produce a real line honours boat.

Wouter

Great concept Macca. Something like this should have happened years ago to the T5.7 It is good to see that a private owner has the guts to just give it a try.

Congrats and I wish you all the best !

Wouter

The only trouble with embedding the pics into the post Wouter, is that they don't re-size automatically to fit the browser window and they then screw up the forum page formatting. Much better to leave them as attachments in my opinion, unless they are already the right size for a 1024x768 display!

Great looking boat Macca! Hopefully some of the other T5.7 guys in Oz will follow suit.

Phil

Macca,
Did you do anything to adjust the Ackerman angle on those AHPC rudder heads?

Mike.

P.S. Great job! Nice to see the creative juices are still flowing down under

One additional issue is that folks with modems get clobbered when they open the link if it's full of in-line photos. Attaching gives them a choice to see the pic or not.

Mike.

Quote

The only trouble with embedding the pics into the post Wouter, is that they don't re-size automatically to fit the browser window and they then screw up the forum page formatting. Much better to leave them as attachments in my opinion, unless they are already the right size for a 1024x768 display!

That is such a photogenic machine Macca! You're going to get more than a few envious looks as a result

I'm already starting to go green myself .....

Here's a drink to your new baby

Maaca,
One you get everything tweaked on the Super Taipan is there any chance of you doing a head-to-head comparason with a stock 5.7? I would be very interested to see how it fares against them and the Capricorn as well. I thought it very interesting that the Capricorns pretty much stomped the 5.7's in the Aus Worlds even though the Capricorn is about 80lbs heavier. It will be interesting to see if the weight savings and wider beam will help or hurt overall performance and under what conditions the benefits will show.
Good Luck,

Your super-Taipan 5.7 looks terrific, Macca. We all look forward reports of comparisons with other boat classes. Being a proud owner of a Taipan 5.7 in Norway, a country with no race classes of Taipans, F18s or other high-tech cats, we are looking at modications of the boat. (I am also the proud father of JIMI).
My question is: Have any of you Taipan owners considered deep high-aspect daggerboards? It seems that AHPC (like Julian Bethwaite) used to prefer rectangular wide/short daggerboards for their boats. The trend during the last 5 years has been to long high-aspect boards and everyone seems to maintain that these are much more effective. Hence, the Capricorn has a foil shape which is very different from that of the Tapipans.
Of course, avoiding contact with the sea bottom is nice, but upwind effciency is king.

Tim Bohan recently told me (and showed) me that the Nacra F18 has come back from very long and slender boards to shorter and wider boards. Seems the trend is reversing a little now. Mind you the Taipan boards are way shorter and wider.

I have considered longer and more slender boards for my boat (Taipan 4.9 based F16) and I could easily modify my wells to take the new boards, but I don't feel uncompetitive upwind with the current boards. I seem to hang in there just fine. So I think I will put this modification of for a while.

Wouter

The original Nacra F18 had the long slender boards (about 8 to 10" wide) as can be found on the Nacra 20. Aparently they work great when the boat has decent forward speed. In light air, however, I hear that the slimmer boards tend to allow a little more leeway and not develop as much lift.

I heard that the new Auscat has long/small daggerboards.
Bimare also uses this kind of boards.

Sorry, small should be read as "slender"

I have sailed the Capricorn and the std taipan and I can't really pick any difference with the boards, I sometimes thing that it more of a trend than a real performance gain. I like the fact that I can leave my std 5.7 boards in the down position when I go downwind, where as the Capricorn boards need to be lifted to stop them breaking....

Macca, since you have both sailed the Capricorn and the 5.7, can you share your opinions on other similarities and differences between the two boats? How is the "feel" with the C compared to the 5.7 in terms of upwind performance, downwind speed etc? Did the "new" hull type make a big difference? The 5.7 does have quite large volume below in the bows.

The Capricorn feels like a much bigger hull, it seems to be sitting on top of the water and with the very straight rocker the boat sometimes feels like it's planing upwind.

The 5.7 feels like a smaller hull but it still feels like it is on top of the water, it has more rocker which makes it much better in waves.

Other than that there are too many differences to make them comparable in a real terms.

Ok, So after sailing the super taipan a few more times (been very busy with work..) we decided that the stock rudders were shithouse. whilst the helm was ok uphill it was [censored] scary downhill. heaps of lee helm and load. we tried different tricks like different rake on the blades, then we tried different pivot axis on the stocks but none worked as well as I had hoped.

So after some calls and emails to Marstrom a set of M20 rudders were ordered, they were meant to be ready at for shipment with my Tornado after the Europeans, but they got a bit busy and didn't have them built in time. Turned out to be a blessing in disguise cause the Tornado is still on the way here and the Rudders were airfreighted last week and today was the first day sailing with them.

Now the boat steers like it should! The tiller arms are shorter so it is very jumpy but I will adapt to that in no time. The helm is perfectly neutral uphill and down. the rudders feel awesome through the water. Oh and they look way cool (most important part)

some pics (wouter might want to put them in the post, cause I don't know how to. I own an IT consultancy too.....)

another angle

rudder head closeup