So many boats have been built to this design,that its probably impossible to know how many by now but here is some back ground in how we became involved in this great design call an Optimist dinghy.
As far as i am aware the Optimist design is now some 58 years old,thats to 2005...............its said that more Optmists exist than all the other One Design dinghys put together,given the time they have been around i am not at all surprised,the fact that no designers fees have ever been asked for or paid will go part way to assisting this but the boat itself is such a perfect starter boat really is what makes this little box of a boat so popular?
In early November 2004 a yacht club, The Knysna YC, on South Africas East Coast asked us to cost and produce five Optimist kits and have them ready to build buy their local kids and Dads ready to the SA Nationals in December........this gave us about 30 days from a cold start! now an order for a new design and five kits is nothing to be sneezed at,so we took on the order ,it became seven kits by the time we got into production,we have so far cut some nineteen in this first twelve months, so a popular little boat.
A little history?
The first boats were basically made from 6mm (1/4") thick plywood,it will have been a three ply? the boat was screwed together using wood cleats,it was quite a solid little boat,some were varnished ,some painted,they lasted a long time but would take on weight as the wood soaked up moisture,they were a huge success and many of those first boats probbably still survive.
Then came the GRP (glass reinforced plastic) boats,they were different in that they had Foam Sandwich bottoms,an very thin sides,back and fronts.......they were made to better tollerances too..........with the Foam Sandwich bottoms they were stiffer,also lighter and with the weight down below where it needs to be.......they were also expensive.........being commercially produced selling through agents ,prices rocketed but they were the boats to use for Racing at a Club level......
As the costs rose the sport was suffering,its just not acceptable to spend so much money on a boat that your child will use only untill he or she is around thirteen years old,then the child is just too large for such a small boat and needs to move on to a larger class of dinghy..... so the class asscociation looked back to the deigns roots....they knew that if the situation was not balanced or reversed the class would suffer from entries,so in came what we now term the Wood/Epoxy Optimist.....that was around 1997........
It was the new Wood/Epoxy design we had to produce.......and fast!
This use of Epoxy gave the team that designed the 'New' Optimist a chance to control weight and produce a much stiffer hull,they started with the best materials ,plywoods to BS1088 ,Selected Meranti or Mahogany Woods,plus Epoxy and GRP 50mm (2") wide tapes.......
Note,when five of our ply/epoxy kit boats were weighed at the SA Nationals,on average they came in some 750 grams lighter than a supper expensive imported Dragon GRP boat from China,this is quite a large margin on a craft that weighs only 32ks total.
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