Hi Lemat,
Great looking board with fabulous craftmanship! Wow. I hope it sails as you expect it to, sure looks like a neat design, congratulations!
I have some great info on how best to set up the centerboard (CBD) gasket, should you need it in the future. I've attached a URL below to a post on FB Old School Mistral Owners Club, from Chris Magoon, a very talented sports enthusiast and superb engineer, who used to live and sail in NZ and then moved back to New Hampshire, US, to finish school and teach engineering there. The post details his very innovative approach to building a gasket "system" (my words), which is easy to use (see the video!), fairly easy to replace if ever needed, and completely solves the problem of "flushing" which is when the water pressure under speed folds the gasket inwards and lets it "flush" up through the CBD well. I read his post a year or so ago, communicated with him, and then implemented his system on the two family Equipe II XR raceboards, both of which needed gaskets. The secret is how he designed a stiff "support layer" under the gasket, which resists any flexing of the gasket upwards. He also has some neat improvements to the CBD holding and friction control.
Chris' system is far superior to using any kind of rubber gasket (trust me, done that), and uses a readily available mylar racing dinghy slot gasket from Hawk Marine or "slot strip" from Rooster Sailing. Chris used a superglue for bonding, which lasted some years, and now has gone to epoxy. I've used Rooster's double-sided tape, but I don't have the TOW he has though I think the tape will work well based on working with it this summer. Here's the link to Chris' post:
www.facebook.com/groups/262517604734203/posts/1184485655870722/On a related note, Chris and I both needed new mast tracks. We got some extraordinary light and smooth tracks from OneHundredBoardz in Slovenia. Matic Meza, the owner and engineer at 100Bdz, has a great design which is used by a lot of European racers. You probably are familiar with them. Premium product at an appropriate price, but Chris and I both love our tracks, which knocked about 1/3 lb off the weight of our old Mistral tracks.
Good wind, LeMat, may your hybrid fly!
