Widget factory

Neal Graham on Castorama's innovative sheet release system and Charles Darbyshire on their on board video gear

This article following on from yesterday's look at the building and engineering of Castorama B&Q. To read about our sail on board click here , or you can see a photo gallery of the boat and Ellen's thoughts on it.

Devices

Neal Graham (aka 'Albert') has been like a pig in s***t these last months. With several Whitbreads under his belt Graham has a similar freethinking mind to Nigel Irens' but whereas Irens applies his to the grand concepts of design, Graham instead prefers to work in macro on the widgets and systems on board Castorama B&Q.

If John Levell and BoatSpeed have conspired to ensure that the new trimaran does not break or if it does (in the case of say the rudders) that it can be fixed at sea, one of the other problems that is an ever present fear when driving a multihull hard is capsize, specifically tripping over the leeward bow and pitchpoling.

The design of Castorama B&Q should help prevent this. The rig is a lot further aft than say a 60ft trimaran and the bows have considerably more volume - not only are they longer but they also have much more freeboard. But despite capsize still remains a possibility.

So it is that Graham has been expending his creative juices in the development of a state of the art sheet release system. Such devices have been available commercially in the past. Don't ask how we know this, but during the 1960s in the days of extremely tippy racing catamarans a device called the Hepplewhite automatic sheet release system was available. Involving a dampened pendulum this electrically triggered a mechanism causing a special jam cleat on deck to open its jaws releasing the sheet should the boat exceed a certain heel angle.

In fact the Albert system is no relation to this. "Heel angle is not a criteron with these things," Graham says. "By the time you reach a certain heel it is probably all over anyway. Ultimately you are far more likely to pitchpole the thing rather than capsize it."

Ellen is adamant that there will be nothing automatic about the system Graham is working on but adds that the system will also help save ropes. "If you need to release a sheet in a hurry then you regularly just completely smoke the rope and burn it, because there is so much load on it," she says. "So this hopefully will reduce the risk of trashing all your ropes because if you are going for a long record attempt you can’t afford to trash everything."

Central to the idea is that most sheets on board are two part with a dead end. In the case of the mainsheet and traveller for example it will be there fixed ends which are released.

However the fearsome genniker for example does not have a two part sheet and in its case they are looking at a way of releasing the turning block, mounted on the aft beam - tethered of course to prevent it launching itself through the mainsail. Graham reckons that their system will release the block by around 2m, the equivalent of easing the sheet by 4m. Similarly with the jib they may look at releasing the barber hauler rather than the dead end of the sheet itself. "You can twist the thing off and depower it completely," describes Graham.

The interesting part is in the release mechanism. They have been working with Spinlock to develop a hydraulic or pneumatic way of releasing a conventional jammer. This may yet be used but their latest thoughts have turned to a system similar to a masthead halyard lock.

"We have made one and have it assembled and we are doing some tests on it on a load bench in England to make sure the thing isn’t going to explode or kill anybody and we will probably fit one in New Zealand and see if it works," says Graham. "We haven’t decided what we’re going to attach it to yet in terms of the traveller or the mainsheet but we’ll fit one and play around with it."

This release mechanism can be operated mechanically by a rope or by a hydraulic or pneumatic or electric servo. In theory, while down below, Ellen could push a button to do a rapid ease on the genniker for example.

Ultimately Graham says they are looking at a PC-based system which will act as the boat's minder when Ellen is asleep. They would like this to be managed by a set of rules under which the release mechanism is fired. This could be an increase in wind strength or a change in wind angle or even an excessive load in the runners or capshrouds. An exciting prospect is that if these are controlled from a PC then it would be a relatively straightforward task for someone in the Offshore Challenges office to blow the sheets by remote from land via satcom...

All this is of course in development and thankfully they have time in New Zealand as well as a delivery trip half way around the world back to Europe to get it sorted.

Similarly they will be fitting load cells on board. "Initially we are going to run just with a forestay loadcell," says Graham. "As we start to develop the sheet release system we will put load cells on the runners and the capshrouds."

In the past Nigel Irens has proposed the idea that the 60ft trimaran should be fitted with load cells in key load bearing areas and these could be used as the equivalent of the rev counter in a Formula 1 race car. Go beyond a certain number of revs and the engine blows up. Go beyond a certain load and your trimaran folds up.

Graham thinks the possibility of this is small, particularly in the short term. "I think ultimately you could five or six years down the track, but the problem is that we don’t know enough about the loads to make judgements like that. One of the things we have found in the past with load cell programs is that certainly if you load cell rod rigging at times you exceed the break load of the rod rigging for very very short periods of time."

Aside from the load cells on the rigging the wingmast is fitted with a fibre optic and sensor system developed by Insensys to monitor the loads in the mast. Effectively this system comprises three sensors on each side of the mast from which loads can be recorded. Sadly it is not an early warning system - as the crew of the maxi-cat Kingfisher 2 maxi-cat know to their cost. Nor is it as sophisticated as the lattice system fitted in the wings of aircraft fighters which can sense for example the exact location of bullet holes. While all this is possible at present no one has had the resources to fit such a system to a wingmast nor had time to concentrate on the enormous task it would be to analyse the data output from such a set-up.

Graham points out the Insensys system is more to get some numbers on the rig. "It is a learning process. Nobody has any real sailing loads on these things. It has been empirical engineering basically. ‘That one broke so that wasn’t quite strong enough there and we’ll beef it up a bit more. Oh, it’s broken there now, so we’ll beef it up a bit more.’ So we are trying to get away from empirical engineering and back to actually engineering from known figures. It still has its flaws and isn’t going to be perfect, but at least we can develop a data file of loads and righting moments in various boats and we can take those forward into other campaigns."


Bringing it to the public

Key to all Offshore Challenges campaigns has been the media side - demystifying offshore racing and bringing it to the public.

For years yachtsmen have been trying to capture what they experience on film or video, the tendency has been only to get the camera out when conditions allow. Thus traditionally there is plenty of footage of boats slipping along in light winds and brilliant sunshine but precious little of what you want to see - what it is like when the breeze is up, it is all going wrong on board and the skipper is terrified.

If you think about it, aside from the outstanding achievement on the water, one of the reasons why the Ellen story of the Vendee Globe was so big is that she was able to capture these moments on video and later show them ("it's so hard," etc).

"We have tried to make sure that all we do is durable and increases the performance of the boat by reducing the load on the skipper," explains Darbyshire. "So take the web cameras - whenever the boat comes on line the web cameras come on and you start to get pictures back immediately without the skipper having to think about taking the picture, where the picture is badly branded or in focus or whether it was something they didn’t show the world. The cameras are in the right positions for good shots, time after time."

12 Sony cameras fixed around the boat including a tiny pencil camera, a vary focus camera on the stern and mast and a 50m submersible camera on the bow. Any four of these cameras can be used in combination at one time. Although it is most likely these will be set on bow, stern, mast and down below angles, Ellen has the facility to be able to change this if need be.

The video conferencing on board is now especially sophisticated. "Doing a video conference used to be pretty difficult," says Darbyshire. "In the Vendee Globe it used to be a case of reaching round picking up a brief case, hooking up the briefcase to the computer and sorting it all out - it was a pretty big commitment. Now, it should be as easy making a phonecall."

Computer capacity is such that they no longer use a dedicated media computer. Ellen will open up the video conference software, clicks dial, selects the view she wants to show and then using a radio mic can walk around the boat with background sound being picked up by eight mics located around the boat. Cleverly audio coming back from the shore is played back through the boat's hi-fi system (although in rough conditions they may try some wireless headphones) allowing Ellen to conduct a two-way conversation via satcoms with an interviewer on land.

"We spent four months making this camera system work. And now it is so simple it is pretty disappointing!" says Darbyshire. "For example on deck so you just press a button and two DV recorders capture two different views at the same time."

Instead of going down the Volvo route where there is a rolling store of the last 60 minutes of footage held on a laptop, footage is being stored on two dedicated DV recorders plus the facility of being able to record to any of the individual cameras should the DVs be trashed.

Equally impressive is the satcoms set up on board. The two large satcom domes mounted immediately aft of the cockpit, are for the Thrane & Thrane Fleet 77 and Fleet 55 antenna. There is also a Thrane & Thrane Fleet 33 terminal, a Motorola Iridum phone for the grab bag and Thrane & Thrane Inmarsat C terminals. In total Darbyshire estimates they have 12-14 telephone lines on the boat!



The satcom domes

During record attempts Darbyshire reckons they will be doing a major pull of data every hour. This will not be just boat speed and position, but any number of things from Ellen's pulse rate to numbers from the load cells (no doubt there will be some correlation here...) However there is also the possibility of getting the numbers back from the boat in real time. "If we were to do a 24 hour record run there is a pretty good chance we would establish a point to point connection between the boat and the shore and have the live instrument data." Using Deckman these could then a virtual instruments back in the office. Darbyshire doesn't expect these to be beamed live to the web just yet, but that is but a small step away.

Darbyshire is also at present working on the video capture system for the Vendee Globe. "We would like to make it even more automatic than it is. Maybe it will record for 10 minutes every hour from two different cameras, so you end up with this nice big stock of footage which will enable you to make a good TV show at the end of it without involving the skipper or taking any of their time. It is really hard because if they are not sailing the boat at 100% they want to be eating or sleeping or getting ready for the next big weather system.