| INTERVIEW WITH MARK LINDSAY
By Bill Bernard Ten years ago, in the winter of 1977-78, Mark Lindsay,
Mike Loeb and Steve Taylor built two identical Flying Dutchmen that changed
the way FD are built and rigged today. Mike and Steve, both FD skippers
and new to the class, were looking for two boats that were identically
rigged to serve as a learning platform in their quest for the 1980 Olympics.
They turned to Mark Lindsay who had a reputation of using common sense
engineering in the construction of racing sailing dinghies. The three decided
that building a complete boat from scratch was out of the question. They
felt that if they started with two bare hulls and finished the boats out,
they would be on the water sooner for less money. The three went to Peter
and Olaf Harken in Pewakee, WI, and made arrangements to use Vanguard's
Flying Dutchman mold. They laid up the hulls with a sandwich construction
of a Kevlar-skins and Nomex- honeycomb with woven carbonfiber either side
of the core and ambient cured epoxy. The shells were then shipped east
to Gloucester, MA, where Mark Lindsay and his crew went to work finishing
the bare shells.
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wasn't really needed. Carbon is fine to use
in high load areas but to use it throughout the hull was overkill."
" Another thing that we tried was the rolled seat tanks, because people involved in the project, Steve Taylor and Mike Loeb and myself, were 505 and 470 sailors and we were used to single floor boats with rolled tanks. We thought it would be easier to build a self-rescuing boat that way. That was a real concern because in those days, the 1-1/2 bottom boats capsized and [swamped] putting you right out of the race. So we came up with that as a innovation [or so we thought]. The problem is the FD genoa scoops enough water into the boat that no amount of bailers in the world can keep up with it. At least the 1-1/2s had the traveler as a sort of water dam, and little holes with flaps in the top-sides that would dump the water out You really only had to bail a little piece of the back end. Boats with single bottoms and the rolled tanks tended to carry a lot of water around. It just wasn't a great idea. Mader innovated the full double bottom. We turned around and immediately copied them." It is interesting to note that the rolled tanks that Lindsay, Taylor, and Loeb saw as innovations had been tried in the' 60 by both European and US builders. But the center spine down the middle of the boat and the diagonal bulkheads from the mast out to the chainplates were new innovations which allowed more rig tension to be carried, which in turn, allowed the mast to be raked further aft in heavy air making the boat easier to sail. Both Steve and Michael did well with the boats. In less than two years they climbed to the top of the class. Michael won the 1980 US Olympic Trials Mader was not the first to build a boat with a full double bottom. In the 1960's four or five builders in Europe were building wooden boats with full double bottoms. Alpa, an Italian builder, was building a fiberglass FD with a full double bottom as was Newport in the US. |
The problem with the glass boats with a double
bottom was that they could not be built stiff enough to hold the rig tension
and still get down to the minimum weight of 276 lbs. Every pound of glass
in the double bottom was one less pound in the hull carrying the rig load.
"Our boats were the first full double bottom boats to really be consistent-ly at minimum weight, just because it's a lot easier with the technology [available today] to build a boat down to minimum weight. Cle Jeltes (International Chief Measurer) said, Gee maybe we should lower the minimum weight again. I said God, don't do that, you're just going to raise the cost all over again." "I think the full-double-bottom is a tremendous improvement because it makes the boat so much easier to sail. It is a little harder to crew in, but you don't have to worry all the time about is the water going in the boat, and if you capsize you can right the thing and sail away." In the early '80s the United States Olympic Yachting Committee "realized that some Europeans were getting the benefit of easier access to the latest technologies when they needed it. If you didn't go an live in Europe, it was hard to have the right equipment. That is what encourage the USOYC to get behind our effort to build boats." In the fall of '81, the USOYC com-missioned Lindsay Boatbuilders to look into building Flying Dutchman in the US. Mark made a study of some of the fast hull shapes that were in the US; an '80 Mader, Mike Loeb's Vanguard/Lindsay and a Hein that was sailed in the '76 Olympics by Norm Freeman for the US. Mark found that the Hein and the Mader were very similar in shape. When the USOYC gave the go ahead, Lindsay Boatbuilders set out to not reinvent the wheel, but to bring FD building into the age of the Radial Tire. Armed with the data on hull shapes Mark redrew the lines while staying within class rules. |
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| There was an evolution that happened between '76 and '84.
It was probably not much thought going into hull shape prior to that time,
other than what Rodney Pattison did --Rodney didn't share his information
with anybody really-- while he was racing. What Pattison did was sort of
separate from the rest of the world. He had his own private boat builder
and everything. He tried just about everything. Our hull shape sort of
converged with what he was thinking. We didn't really find that out until
we talked with Joe Richards in 1983. Joe Richards had the benefit of all
of Rodney's best thinking on hull shapes. We compared notes and they were
virtually identical, the conclusions he came to and what we did."
"It's all within one-design limits, but basically what happened was that boats got straightened out; they were made as narrow as they can be at the maximum beam, as full as they can be at the hollow in the bow, and the rocker and back end is as flat as it can possibly be. The only area [in the hull shape] that's left --that is an area of exploration that I see at this point-- is the deadrise angle of the vee at the bottom of the hull, how flat a vee is the boat sideways, and how much rocker is there in the middle of the forward part of the boat." "Prior to '76 the boats were not really pushed all the way as far as beam widths at the bow and the middle. Some of the boats were actually a little bit wide in the middle of them a little bit and skinny up forward. That was the difference that we found [in shape] between the older Vanguard and what we did [with our boats]. There were some major differences there." While the R&D in hullshape was going on, another team was researching what the best material to build the boat would be. It was decided early on that a plastic hull with a wood deck was too labor intensive. They felt that a all composite boat would be the route to go. They turned to their suppliers for technical assistance. Using the information provided by duPont, Hexcell and |
others, they made up many test panels which were then analyzed
until they found the right combination for the skins and core.
It was determined that the lay-up schedule should be Kevlar honeycomb Kevlar on the hull and deck with the epoxy being a high temperature epoxy that would require baking the boat to 250o F for four to five hours to cure the epoxy. Once the hull lines had been drawn and the layup schedule had been determined, making the tooling was next. Hull and deck plugs were constructed and molds pulled off them. When it was decided that high temperature epoxy was going to be used, it meant that they had to build an oven large enough to accommodate a Flying Dutchman. The oven kind of looks like an over grown dog house --22' long, 8' wide and 4' high. In the fall of '82 the first all composite Flying Dutchman rolled out the door of Mark Lindsay shop. This boat went to Kelson Elam of Dallas, TX. The FD community was waiting until they saw the first before passing judgement. Kelson's first major regatta was the '82 FD Worlds held down under in Australia where the race committee does not start any race in light air --light air being anything under 18 knots. When Kelson was asked to compare his old FD ( a Mader) to the Lindsay, "... it's stiffer than my old boat when it was new. On a three sail reach when a puff hits the new boat accelerates instantly." Orders started coming in mainly from the US sailors but one or two from outside the country. Janathan Mckee/Carl Buchan took delivery of bare unrigged boat which they rigged in the winter of '83. Jonathan and Carl were able to do what no other American FD sailor had been able to do. In May of '83 they won the FD Worlds in Sardinia, Italy. One year latter at the '84 Olympics in Long Beach, CA, they won a Gold Medal for the US. |
I was in Long Beach for the Games as a FD Measurer. During
the last race in the '84 Olympics, as it became clear the US would win,
one of the [FD] measurers who was out on the water [watching the races]
made the comment that if the US won with a Lindsay FD, everyone would have
to have one. He felt it would be a bad thing for the class, if everyone
felt that they had to switch boats to win...
Mark Lindsay responds: "Well, that's a silly argument, because the guys who are going to go to win, the guys who are going to go to the Olympics are going to have new boats, nobody's going to go to the Olympics in a 5-year-old boat. One boat from each country goes, and every country that's halfway serious has some form of Olympic team, and that team will make sure that their representative has the best equipment possible for it, so he's going to have a new boat, he's not gonna have an old, tired..." I think he was making the comment, not just for the Olympics per se, but the class in general. You would have builder-switching because... "People will buy new boats whether they need them or not, in order to keep up with the Joneses. I sail an 8-year-old 505. There's nothing wrong with that boat that a certain minimum amount of maintenance wouldn't take care of. The boat still has lead corrector weights in it. It's an epoxy- Kevlar boat, and now I don't feel that the boat itself holds us back when we go race the thing. The amount of time I spend practicing is the biggest problem. OK, second biggest problem might be just basic ordinary maintenance, keeping all the lines and blocks and everything running smoothly and replace and worn stuff and making sure that the blades are sanded and nice and make sure the sails are really the best they could be and all that sort of thing. But there's nothing wrong with that boat. That boat could go out and win the world championships tomorrow. |