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The Shadow Cat
- Thread starter Steve2
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T2x
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As usual you have no idea what you're talking about. Subtle humor must not have been taught on the "reservation"......or else you lost yours on Route 25A somewhere back in the 70's.
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T2x
Icon/Charter Member
Brownie and I have joked for years about this. The Shadow cat, in fact, was ugly as a stump(similar to a Flight Cat
) ......... Linder insisted that it be 8 feet wide for trailering so we compromised on the side design..and the result was an ungainly hull that was awkward to look at from the rear quarter....especially on a trailer. The performance on the other hand was second to none at that time and can hold its own today....although the flat sides make it a very wet slow speed runner on a breezy day. The Chris Cat was a bit wider and had stepped sides but was only marginally different. Superboat managed to modify the lines after "popping" it and miraculously made it even uglier..... The later 35 foot Shadow Cat plug had sculpted sides, looked very different from the 30, and was much more stylish. Of course I burned that plug....because I have a short temper and very little patience....especially with nitwit wannabes...(see post above).
The reason we started Conquest was because I really didn't like being hemmed in by tooling and was aggravated by the disappointment I had with the flat sided Shadow . My tunnel boat racing days with Molinari's and Seebolds taught me the value of both wood (speed and repairability) and no design limits. The ability to start with a clean sheet of paper with almost every boat was what had put Cougar at the top of the heap.....and we understood that. We did come up with a way to make wooden boats strong and durable.......so we did not have to play with aluminum like my friends, Mr. Brown and Mr. Curtis.
T2x
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OneBadInjun
New member
Brownie and I have joked for years about this. The Shadow cat, in fact, was ugly as a stump(similar to a Flight Cat
The later 35 foot Shadow Cat plug had sculpted sides, looked very different from the 30, and was much more stylish. Of course I burned that plug....because I have a short temper and very little patience....especially with nitwit wannabes...(see post above).
The reason we started Conquest was because I really didn't like being hemmed in by tooling and was aggravated by the disappointment I had with the flat sided Shadow . My tunnel boat racing days with Molinari's and Seebolds taught me the value of both wood (speed and repairability) and no design limits. The ability to start with a clean sheet of paper with almost every boat was what had put Cougar at the top of the heap.....and we understood that. We did come up with a way to make wooden boats strong and durable.......so we did not have to play with aluminum like my friends, Mr. Brown and Mr. Curtis.
T2x
Well, I wasn't going to actually say it was "wet", "an ungainly hull", "with dissapointing hullsides", "awkward to look at", "ugly as a stump"...which is all true. All I said was it always looked "boxy" in design, and every suck-up on this board gets their panties in a bunch. Thank-you for recognizing George Linders shortcomings of asthetic design on the old Shadow 30. The deck design wasn't bad at all, considering. And it did run well, once you got past, say, 50 m.p.h. And 60 to 110 plus, was a blast, lol.
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One thing that T2x, Linder and Adams did was to break the code on wood composite construction. They figured out how to avoid the old "acre of boat" result of running a wooden cat hard in rough water. Compared to the other boats that we used to race, the cats rode so well that it was possible to kill them while enjoying a nice ride. We went to aluminum construction so that at least it would sink after it broke up. Don't tell them that I said anything nice about them...........
T2x
Icon/Charter Member
Maybe you and I can team up and "decode" the wood in some indian heads on this board......
See ya soon, Mister Brown.
Steve2
Contributor
T2x, what is YOUR personal view about the differences of wood versus fiberglass in the fact that steve1 claims the exact same things you do about wood, only he uses glass. Not starting a war of words, but there must be a reason you prefer wood over glass - wouldn't glass give a much nicer finish and increase strength overall?
OneBadInjun
New member
Steve...Adams built Linders designs using plywood covered in glass. They called it a new type of a composite. Not sure you and I would call it a true composite, by todays standards, but they did.
OneBadInjun
New member
Pixie Dust??? Oh wow...talk about think'n outside of the box, eh Allan?! lol:cheers2:
T2x
Icon/Charter Member
Remember this was long before you could pop a plug out of a computer...... and during the infancy of cored materials. What we did was marry exotic plywood and the best glass laminates available.(A Conquest actually had as much glass as a Shadow but it was hand sandwiched between multiple layers of wood). George was skeptical at first, but we concocted a "recipe" after I asked Kenny to hand fabricate a number of different test laminates including Carbon fiber, bi and tri ax and even a 3/16 aluminum skin at one point. I still have a few of the samples. We settled on what finally became an almost bullet proof schedule and the boats evolved to the point where we could have removed the internal ribs after construction. (The pixie dust came from a little fairy who worked at a hair salon nearby, but that's another story..
)To your point, I still feel that wood has a place in small circle type race boats. Wood has a lot of qualities that are difficult to reproduce artificially. Folks like Peter Hledin and Steve have certainly taken the glass construction technology to a point where it would be very difficult to beat them in terms of strength/weight ratio and design in the big boat arena. Structural integrity on the other hand has been greatly compromised worldwide in pursuit of light weight and speed. To me this is in direct conflict with the rigors of true offshore use and has resulted in grave tragedies like the fatal UIM crash last season. I believe that many of the major accidents and resultant injuries and fatalities have come at least in part as a result of the over use of ultra light technologies.
T2x
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At the 1979 World Championships in Venice, Italy, we had a round table discussion of catamaran construction, attended by myself (bit player), James Beard, Don Shead, all 3 Molinaris, Cesare Scotti, Bill Seybold, Clive Curtis, Sonny Levi, and a dozen others. We were all building plywood cats back then. Finally, the discussion reached aluminum, and the Italians got all excited by the concept of "Aero construzzione". Had to be the answer. Sonny Levi, King of droll, said "I say, have you ever seen an aircraaaaaaft that struck the f**king water? End of discussion.
OneBadInjun
New member
Yes, issues definately can be overcome by design.
Disclaimer: forgive me as I am sitting here in my office dreaming of being on the water.
Fast forward 30 years and I have seen an airplane hit the deck of an aircraft carrier. I can't imagine a boat taking much more shock than that. It seems to me that the shear load from the center section to the hull has to be a very weak point on a cat. Has anyone ever tried to design a cat with a suspended center section?
T2x
Icon/Charter Member
FYI The joint between the inner hull sides and tunnel roof is the strongest point in any cat hull by design and lamination thickness.
There have been two and four point suspended sponson cats tried on an experimental basis over the years with virtually no success. Interesting the fastest scale model race boat design ( I believe it's called the "Drag and Fly") uses a 4 point design with the main hull body supported on "legs"..... This design has been tried repeatedly at full scale and runs nothing like its smaller brother.
