Dickson's dinky dinghy

By ROBIN BAILEY

If there's not too much or too little wind for America's Cup racing today, Chris Dickson will be skippering Oracle against OneWorld for the right to race off against Alinghi on the Hauraki Gulf next month.

One of New Zealand's greatest sailors, Dickson would dearly love to topple Russell Coutts and take out the Louis Vuitton challenger series. He won't get the chance until January, and Oracle has first to punt OneWorld out of the equation in the best-of-seven repechage series now under way.

Off the water, work has been quietly proceeding on a special project that has created a unique high-tech dinghy as a Christmas present for the Takapuna sailor.

It is has been built by six students from Northland Polytechnic out of the same materials used in the construction of the America's Cup class yachts.

When Dickson said he wanted a dinghy to use as a family boat for summer, Albany company High Modulus and resin supplier Synthepol, from Onehunga, saw a chance to do something special that would also be an important training exercise for a team of young boatbuilders.

High Modulus, which creates composite engineering designs and supplies materials to boatbuilding projects the world over, supplied the laminate design and carbon fibre cloth, while Synthepol supplied the resin.

Under the guidance of boatbuilding lecturers Glenn Maconaghie and Roger Rhodes, the Northland students built the dinghy in a female mould using the sophisticated materials, with the dinghy eventually weighing just 31 kilos. A standard fibreglass version would have been a third heavier.

Maconaghie says it was an exciting one-off project that gave the students experience in construction techniques used for racing yachts, such as vacuum bagging and carbon fabrics. Northland Contract Boatbuilders gave one of the students work straight away on the company's carbon fibre booms.

"We used a female mould to build the dinghy, so the students learned about the preparation of these moulds and the application of gelcoats," says Maconaghie.

"They had to take a completely different approach to their preparation, and laying the carbon fibre into a female mould was extremely tricky. The cloth had to be cut exactly to shape and laid in very carefully."

He says the dinghy needed six different vacuum-bagging stages, in which the cloth is sucked against the mould and excess air is removed by vacuum pressure.

"It was very difficult, but the students did really well and enjoyed building the boat," he says.

For the technically minded, it is built from woven carbon fibre fabric, polyester resin and Herex C70.90 cross-linked foam.

It is light but extremely strong, making it easy to row, lift and drag up the beach, particularly for Dickson's children as they get older. Grace is 3 and Rose just 10 months.

The hull sides, made of clear polyester gelcoat, show the black textured carbon fabric underneath.

High Modulus director, engineer Brian Jones, says the Northland students made a beautiful job of the dinghy. It is leading edge in design and is stunning, both visually and structurally.

"The little boat is above my expectations and is really magnificent," he says. "It says a lot for the dedication and competence of the student team. The Dickson family will love it."