Having been asked by friends and acquaintances to work on a number of older ½ and ¼ tonners to make them more competitive in their revived class competitions run under IRC, and which have gone on to win both those titles this year, here are some of the things we think are important:

The first point is to understand the upgrade is for IRC, not the old class rule. Almost every project has started with an owner saying they are about to buy the fastest 1/x tonner ever, what do I think? That usually means it was one of the later boats which will be carbon construction, a quite distorted hull shape, and which might have come from the smaller lighter hull/larger sail plan corner of IOR. That makes it less attractive from an IRC rating point of view, as IRC at smaller sizes gives credit to weight, low tech construction, and age, all of which are hopefully being traded for a longer hullshape. Combine this with the fact that some of the earlier IOR hull shapes can be less distorted, or if distorted will bring a real length increase, and perhaps the earlier boats have some advantages. You could fill in stern creases or add waterline length forward, but experience suggests that this isn’t going to be very productive, and may infringe against the rules of the 1/x Ton Class, even after IRC accepted that minor changes of this nature wouldn’t necessarily alter the age date, they do tend to increase the LWL and thus lower the DLR which increases the IRC rating.

Two boats stand out among those we have seen recently: the first ¼ tonner we worked on was a Farr boat from the 70’s named Espada, which wasn’t from the heaviest end of the spectrum, but was early enough to have only minor distortions and a relatively wide stern, making the hull shape look remarkably modern. After the upgrades she has been 1st and 2nd in the last ¼ ton cups, and won her Cowes Week class with nothing but 1sts and 2nds.

The other really interesting boat was a Whiting ½ tonner called Magic Dragon found in Australia, 34’ long and a rating of .934. The hullshape was long and bumpy in typical Whiting fashion, but for a boat which might of claimed to be the largest ½ tonner with the lowest rating that would be an acceptable tradeoff: nothing works like length. We didn’t get to work on that boat, but finding the Whiting ¼ tonner Runaway Bus gave us the opportunity to work with that hull style.

The three areas we have worked on are rig, foils and maintenance.

Runaway Bus before

Runaway Bus after

The old multiple in-line spreaders, runners, and checkstay rigs may still mean ‘Raceboat’ to a lot of us, but the reality is that they are tweaky, gravity prone, and unable to fly the larger kites promoted by IRC. In my view this is the single most useful result from changing to a non-overlapping swept spreader configuration: it does have a lower rig factor which is good, it does get the sail plan a bit further up in the air which offsets slightly the fact that you have to take an overall sail area reduction, but mainly it lets you put big kites on the boat of nice aspect ratio, which opens up a significant performance increase for a minor rating change. If the rig can be stepped in the same location that is beneficial, but trying to balance the jib and main aspect ratios is the key to making these rigs work, and means sometimes that the rig has to go aft. Chainplates are easy to retrofit on older boats, especially wooden ones, which later higher tech construction starts to require more engineering sensitivity.

The next area to work on is foils. The two keel issues which need to be addressed are making sure all the ballast necessary in the fin, and that the fin is using modern foil sections. Our original Espada keel has been reused on other boats as it is generically the right sort of weight for ¼ tonners, but Catch which came second at this years ¼ ton cup reprofiled their existing fin with new sections, so a full replacement is not strictly necessary. The main issue if a keel replacement is contemplated is to ensure the structure is up to the task which is not always easy to ascertain or ensure. The rudder would tend to be worth upgrading as they have evolved in both profile and section since the heyday of the 1/x tons, it may be possible to re-blade the existing stock, or there is a standard ¼ ton rudder design available which has been used on a number of the UK ¼ tons.

If you aren’t going to play with the hull shape, there is almost no question that it will still need a lot of TLC, the best thing to do is to strip everything off, refair and repaint the hull and deck, maybe open up the cockpit a bit or make it a bit shallower, and replace the deck gear.

I think it has taken the class structure of the ¼ tons in particular to make the success of this revival happen. They have an active proponent of the class in Peter Morton who has made a real effort to encourage people to get boats out the sheds and hedges and on the water. The mods for the ¼ tons aren’t that expensive, and don’t seem to spoil the great sense of nostalgia and fun that have always surrounded the class, and which has led to some excellent racing.

The ½ tons seems to be having more of a debate about whether mods should be allowed, and the issue is perhaps more difficult as the cost is proportionately greater. It comes down to whether it is likely that a healthy class can survive based solely on ½ tonners in their original configuration, or whether they need to embrace modernised boats with more utility but at more cost. While there is no question the recycled 1/x tons are more competitive than the old ones for a number of reasons, not least of which is the commitment of the crews with new sails, new gear, and a new bottom, that advantage probably doesn’t fully translate into a mixed IRC fleet with modern designs in it, success in these classes really requires the complete package - as it should.

Mark

Mark Mills
Mills Design

07/31/07

2007-07-31

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