Denti, I accept that.
If my Pa's Pik 17/19? hadn't had carbon in it he would not have survived the accident that he had.
I will be trusting an Extra 300's Carbon spar soon.
Good products.
It's the flipside - when the bits start to get bigger and more 'engineered' than simple spars and skins.
The current Volvo Race management have an independent surveyor using ultrasound on all of the boats in Sanya (China) at the moment.
One of the boats suffered some hull delamination early in the first leg, several others have had rig failures, again. The headline sponsor is trying to minimise the risk.
The shock loads put into these boats is way in excess of what the worst pilot could do to his aircraft (short of what Pa did to his anyway..) but the fact that an intrinsically weakened structure (through either misunderstanding of the load at a point, or poor manufacture, again at a point) is brutally punished by the completely unforgiving good structure surrounding it.
Yacht design R&D is heavily restrained by budget, and they have made major errors in the past. Would an Aero Engineer ever suggest a welded keel structure? Simon LeBon's boat Drum was the first casualty. There have been tens more of those, some fatal.
My main point is that Carbon is a fab material. Not necessarily the way it's stuck together though. It's the fact that it is so hard to inspect that gives me:-
Huge concern on a boat.
Not much concern on smaller structures - where the person with the glue/heat/vacuum knows what they are doing in a highly regulated industry.
It's the big composite stuff that I just don't know how to react to - in the same way that I believe fervently in nuclear power. But just how much do we really need to spend on testing?
Last edited by boguing; 10th Feb 2012 at 18:05.