New Heights

Since he launched his first On The Prowl design John Ilett has focused on improving the hydrofoil systems. His most recent configuration has proved super-competitive and, with its semi-automatic pitch control, relatively easy to use

Garth Ilett's International Moth On The Prowl was built in December 1999 and launched only two weeks prior to the Australian National and World Championships in January 2000 on the Swan River in Perth.

She was designed full-sized directly on to 10mm MDF which was to become the male mould. The hull was built using a mixture of SP's fabrics, 5mm Herex PVC foam core and Vantico LC3600 epoxy resin. The inner skin of 63g Kevlar and the foam core were vacuum bagged in a single shot. It seems a little mad that this step of the build took two experienced laminators four and a half hours to use only 850g of resin...

The outer skin of 160g carbon, also vacuum bagged, did not take so long. The hull shell came off the mould at 4.7kg. Often a male-moulded hull requires further filling and fairing, but as the mould was so fair and the vacuum bag process reproduced this fairness at each step the finishing required only epoxy high-build primers before the final gloss paint. The finished hull weighed in at 8.5kg; fully rigged just on 28kg.

To read the remainder of this article please go to the March 2003 edition of Seahorse, available at selected newsstands or by calling: + 44 (0) 1590 671899 or by email at: info@seahorse.co.uk

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