Custom ‘Stealth’ Foiler from Australia

Robbie Lovig & Barry Marmiom have put together some ideas I have received past months. Getting an A-Class rig on a shorter flying oriented platform/hulls.
They seem to be flying good, we’ll wait for videos though.

— Edit: I had a mail from Roland Whitehead on Marmion: “Just in case you didn’t realise, Barry Marmion was the builder of the “Edge” era C Class cats. He is a master of cheap, light and very effective ply racing machines. A genuinely lovely guy from whom I learnt a whole stack really quickly. If you get out to Melbourne at some time, do not fail to go and see him!”
( I’ve beeng in the cat scene only since 2002, so I missed the good old C-Class/Mayfly/Icarus days. But without a doubt we are not missing this great Era!) —

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Barry Marmion on the project: “… Stealth Aus, concept I developed with my son Brad who designed the hulls. I did not have a big budget so I built the 15′ 6” hulls out of ply in my carport. I Glued 3 broken sections of A class carbon mast together and rigged it with a 2nd hand cut down A class main to end up with a boat costing $ 4,500.

After watching C class foiling Brad and I decided to design and retro fit foils to the Stealth. To construct the moulds we had 8 plugs (4 for each foil) made up using a router machine at RMIT, and then took moulds of the pugs. The 1st set foils I laid up had 10 layers of 200 gram carbon and a expanding foam core, they weren’t up to the stresses and broke under the keel. The 2nd foils of consisted of 15 layers of C F with end grain cedar core They are still good a bit heavy (5 kg) each.

The epoxy glue for the foils was sponsored and supplied by Marine Timbers and the rest of the materials for moulds and foils cost around $ 2,500.
It has not been an easy development process due to the fact that Stealth was not built for foiling.. Breakages include ! set of foils, 4 rudder blades, 5 rudder boxes, had to reinforce the main bulkheads,

My thanks to Robbie who tirelessly developed the tuning of Stealth Aus “

Robbie Lovig:
“Just writing regarding a boat myself and Barry Marmion have been developing over the last few months. Basically its a plywood catamaran with an A Class rig running L/V foils and T-foil rudders. Barry built the boat and foils/moulds in his carport!

On the budget of a semi-retired builders income!
The toughest thing we’ve found is the amount of gear you break with the loads being generated.
I’m really impressed with this project primarily due to the lack of funding and how effective our trial/error method is working.

You guys probably have plenty of people trying to show you what they are upto with foiling, the big difference with this is the lack of funding behind the project.
We are maintaining stable flight off the breeze now and are skimming/flying upwind.
Will keep giving you running updates.”

Cheers
Robbie Lovig.
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CSN – As Robbie points out, being a Custom Garage project makes this cat even more interesting. Also the TNZ J foil conf (I don´t know why so much issues with the names, ‘J’ is the perfect way to describe this type of boards in my view)
Beyond I support and encourage any kind of development, I really don´t like wands & complicated systems on cats.
Those are called for the Moths, the current perfect flying machines, although sometimes you need to swim to launch it… and are useless in 5-6knots, once flying the are untouchable right now.

Cats still have the best combo and the ability to experience a smooth ride in floating mode, an asset the racing A-Class should never lost imo. And as reported from my Exploder 2014 rides the current foiling learning process is a great and rewarding experience. Expect of course more development to get further stability and shorter time frames to handle long foiling rides. From the launching and sailing perspective I still prefer insert from the top solutions for single handed Cats.

Those plywood hulls look really good. I will get more info from Robbie, specially on the handling the ‘Js’ as it is was one of the key points we always have with Arno while discussing new flight developments.