Speedshopping the Norlin Mk III
In Nyköping a town south of Stockholm a new fleet of Twopointfour sailors has emerged, much because of the dedicated enthusiasm of Lars Lindquist.
It is a well established fact that most productions Norlins are built to standards significantly below what you can achieve under the class rule and what you should expect from a serious builder. In short many of them are "rubber boats" and to heavy in the mouldings.
It is also well understood among the top guns in the class that there is significant difference in performance between a production Norlin and one that has passed through the “speed shop”.
In Nyköping the members of the fleet decided to make a joint effort to update their fleet and here will follow a series of pictures describing what they have done.
Lars has a blog where you can follow the activities in the fleet at http://nykoping24mr.blogspot.com/.
Here is to typical set ups of the Norlin Mk III, the single skin with inner moulding covering the entire cockpit area and the sandwich set up with a cut down inner moulding.
These are not the only configurations that has been used through the years but they pretty much represent the better and the worst. The single skin/full inner moulding is of cause the worst, both heavy and soft. Through many years there where no bulkheads in the boat, just covers for the floatation foam so there is no serious structure taking the loads from the rig and keel.
It s wise to be well protected when you hit the boat with the grinder.
Ripping out a full inner moulding saves you around 17kg that did not do any good anyway. Building a serious structure will put back 8-9kg but these will if well executed completely change the performance of the boat.
We all know excessive heel is no good to windward and having a rig that accentuates this phenomenon even more is making things even worse.
What is done here is a lot better than standard but in my view connecting the shrouds to the mast step with a set of under deck lowers as in the sketch below, is necessary if you want to keep the rig upright in the boat.
Keeping the rudderpost straight is important as well. Another thing in this area is that many boats has the mainsheet fastened in the deck and the deck is insufficiently reinforced so the main sheet is actually moving up and down with the strength of the wind. When you know that 10mm give or take on the mainsheet can be the difference to windward in a tight fleet you need to know the mainsail leech sits where you want it.
As you stiffen your boat up and increase the loads in the rig you have to make sure all links in the chain stands the test. This is how a standard rig lever looks pretty soon when your boat is strung up hard. The pictures below show some tips how to fix it but in my view you need to lock the width to, so on the ones I have fixed I have welded a covering plate both on the back and front side too. As seen on the drawing the lever arm also needs to be longer to handle the high loads, releasing them downwind for forward rake might just snap your fingers.
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