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

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/

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.