Marblehead foil design presents an interesting challenge because the maximum permitted draft is extremely generous. In most monohull keelboat classes, maximum draft is well short of the crossover where additional righting moment gained becomes outweighed by hydrodynamic and structural considerations. For most classes, draft can therefore be regarded as fixed (always go to maximum). In...Read More

Picking up where the last A Cat post left off, we were contemplating the relative merits of foam core and Nomex style aramid paper honeycomb. Honeycomb is a very efficient structural solution because it concentrates material in effective load paths between the skins.  Each cell is braced at the interface with other cells, and there...Read More