Hello,
I am doing a land yacht design for school, I was wondering how do a calculate the correct dimensions of my mainsail. I planning have a a 4 seater.
Thanks
You are going to need lots of sail probably 10 sqm or more, probably very full in shape.
An old 14 ft catamaran rig might work well.... It will get you moving but not lots of speed.
4 people are a lot of weight spread across the 3 wheels.
Thinking on the subject a bit, if your determined to go with 4 people sailing on the yacht, say with an average weight of 80kg+ each, the yacht weight its going to be 500-600kg+ and thats the weight of a small car.
So the wheels and tyres are going to be at least from a small car.....
So you will end up with a yacht probably the size of this one..
How are you going to transport the yacht? Do you have a VERY large trailer?
Have a read of this following thread, it shows what other schools have done... It may be better to have several small yachts than 1 big yacht.
www.seabreeze.com.au/forums/Land-Yacht-Sailing/General/Esperance-Farm-Training-Centres-LLM-project/
wow Thanks so much!... my inspirations is coming from a concept design Mercedes did for the L.a Autoshow. I will be doing a 1/5 scale of my design not full scale. Heres a link I was also thinking about using 4 wheels instead of 3. www.carbodydesign.com/archive/2008/10/21-mercedes-benz-formula-zero/
Hi Lisa,
Almost all of these "design projects" from car manufacturers and engineering companies are on paper only- rarely ever being built, and even if they do build them they are just for static display.
As gizmo said- keep it simple and it will work.
You need to keep your landyacht as light as you can- and as small as you can.
Use the basic design of the lefroy mini, all its materials and components are easily available- and its built with basic workshop tools and skills.
You can customise the seat and bodywork using anything from plywood, fibreglass, frame and fabric/heat shrink plastic (same principal as early aircraft).
there has even been a corrugated cardboard body painted with fibreglass resin.
We regularly get students asking for help here- wanting to re-invent the landyacht, but very few of thier projects end up working very well, or get finished at all.
One student a while back forgot to tell us that the school had dictated overall dimensions, sail size and restricted the speed- and came to us for advice with very little time left.
Can you let us know exactly your school is requiring you to do regarding design limitations so we can point you in the right direction to save you some time.
We wont be designing the whole project for you- but will happily help you avoid any pitfalls or possibly dangerous mistakes.
or perhaps it can be incredibly simple and relatively light.
here is testpilot1 and one of our more fun building projects. It took 1 week to design and build the chassis , another week to make the seat
a simple 3 seater witha 9m recut windsurfer sail on a freestanding mast.
the steel is all telescoping cold drawn steel, seat is polyester resin/glass.
yacht weighs in at 120kg!!!!!
passenger weight in the photo is about 280kg.
front wheel and steering assembly if straight off my promo class 5, rear wheels are 10"miniminor on mini hubs(22mm axle) for transport the yacht was designed to pull apart and fit INSIDE a single axle 8'x5' trailer.the mast breaks down into 3 sections the same length as the boom
note the lack of bracing and stays because we used cold drawn tube.
the yacht is simply a big T frame class 5
performance is a suprise,as it keeps up with the promos when we sail
she goes by the name love ,peace and insanity
