Reply To: OK Dinghy Weight Concentration
Dave,
I don’t disagree with you, i am not saying that i think the rules don’t have room for improvement i have just provided my interpretation of what they say.
If someone really wants to cheat it is easy enough to build the cheat into the construction of the boat that is very difficult for a measurer to find, but it is still the responsibility of a measurer to ‘try’ and identify these things.
The issue in Black Rock was far more simple. I am pretty sure that you as a UK measurer would not have issued a certificate to a boat that had 5kg of backing plates attached to the back of the toe straps. Yet the boat in question presumably had been measured in Denmark, so there is clearly an inconsistency in terms of measurement from country to country. I think the Chief Measurer has a role to play here.
Swing and Tip tests have been discussed and discarded several times. No harm in revisiting them, but i recall tests in the past proved unsatisfactory.
To Tony Woods point i think there will always be an element of judgement needed by measurers.
I would think about it like this: What does the fitting do and how strong does it need to be?
A toe strap backing plate does a similar job to a backing plate on the towing eye of your boat (in fact it probably takes less load). If you wouldn’t use the same backing plate on your towing eye that you used on your toe straps then you are probably concentrating weight.
I am sure the debate will rumble on, but i hope we don’t see anymore of the character assassination i have read on facebook over the last couple of days.
Cheers Terry
