Land Yacht

I have long liked the idea of a land yacht. Hammering across beaches of round air fields. When I was younger, my friend and I (Gary, who else) once went over to an airfield to watch some. These machines have stuck in my mind. Only now have I gotten round to putting one together.

This machine is basically a big T shape of aluminium extrusion called Simplair. I sell this stuff to factories for compressed air installations. We had some off cuts from previous jobs. The mast is also from the same stuff. It has channels moulded into is which use fitch plates to clamp things on to it, such as fittings, outlets for air and brackets. This made the assembly very easy.

The steering set up always intrigued me as a youth, then I learnt about trail and offset, its all very obvious now how the geometry works out. This still isn't quite right, but it works, and is strong. The forks are a 20" MTB unit, sliced close to the crown and re-welded with a MIG welder. Head angle is about 45 degrees.

The hull was cut from a sheet of 8 x 4 3/8 ply. Screwed and glued with drywall screws and gripfill (polyurethane construction glue, magic) It's not intended to look too pretty, but is comfortable and holds you in quite well. The steering gear is again robbed from a bicycle I found abandoned on some waste ground. The tiller is made from 7/8" cromoly tube from a previous project. Cables laced to 6mm ball joints with auto adjusting threads complete the steering.

The mast and boom are of Simplair. The sail was made using blue polytarp, the kind you find in your local hardware shop, and favoured by builders for covering up piles of sand on your driveway. This method is advocated by many in the backyard boatbuilders fraternity. In fact you can buy kits of white heavyweight tarp to make very respectable sails from. However the guy who sells it is in the states. So blue tarp it was for me. The sail runs in one of the channels extruded in the Simplair, like a 'proper' sail track. There is a sheave in the mast head, and a halyard, but I don't think I will ever raise or lower it. It seems much easier to roll it all up. Next one will be a sprit rig!!

I do now have the mainsheet on, and made three blocks with 3" sheaves, they work of a fashion, but this was never intended to be a super performance machine, I have had a practice outing on a local school playground, it went OK considering the poor wind on the day. We will be testing a Bassingbourne airfield (Royston) soon, a full sailing performance report will follow soon. If this one works out OK I may consider building something more serious with an old windsurfer rig, that should really fly.

The whole concept of this project was build this from the scrap bin with a budget of £5.00. I failed as I spent about £18.00 most of which was on the sail. It took nearly a year of scrounging, and waiting for bits to turn up, and pondering how I could do something for nothing with what I had, but it was great fun.