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Old     (toyotafreak)      Join Date: Sep 2003       03-16-2005, 11:30 PM Reply   
You might think this is kinda anal, but...I built an Excel spreadsheet to allow us TOYOTA guys to experiment with different ballast combinations, and want to offer it up to Wakeworld to build on, use as food for thought, fuel for flame, whatever. Most of the people I've shown it to seem impressed but they're not really in the mode to put it to use yet. Hopefully some of you are ;-)

The sheet contains pages for our S22 and SX v-drive hulls and also for the X22/E22 d-drive hulls. There's an overhead shot of each sized to a 1:20 scale. I've also assembled a fairly comprehensive list of commercially-available ballast sacs with dimensions, weights, images, and also drawings built to a 1:20 scale.

Follow the instructions, and you can drag and drop a Big Bump or Fat Seat or Side Sac or FC-1980 into your boat to see where it fits. That tool in in itself helped me, and is kinda cool because you can see which sac will fit where...

Better than that, I show you how to use the sheet's calculators to enter your boat's weight and center of gravity, then measure the effects on CG that your new virtually-placed bags will have on your overall CG. This calc is important to trim, especially when heavily ballasted (or when your boat is extra sensitive to balance).

On the original (not for public consumption) version I'd go out in the boat and try different things, then come back and recreate the scenario in the spreadsheet to see how the real-world performance of the ballasted boat and its wake characteristics affected CG measurement. I can tell you for sure that 160-pounds of Pop Products sacs in the bow turn a stern-heavy boat into a nice driver, and it's no wonder that the spreadsheet shows that the CG is moved forward almost 4" by said sacks.

There's also a sheet that will convert diam & length or LxWxH to gallons to pounds to minutes at GPH to cu.ft. to.....

It really is a cool sheet. Maybe not for all peeps all the time, and surely not bulletproof or QA'd or anything, but it's a cool premise and I spent most of a weekend on this version.

Finally, even though the pages only cover the two 22-foot TOYOTA hulls, any interested party could adapt it to YOUR hull pretty dang easily. The hard work's already done. Should you want to try this on your hulls, the hardest part will be finding a good overhead shot (or drawing.) Draw a line in Excel that represents the published length of your boat, then resize the image until the rubrail-to-rubrail length matches the line you just drew. Crop it, clone it, and then replace the Epic images in the sheet with it. Just make sure you're comfortable with the sheet as-is before expecting an easy time upgrading to your boat.

Why would this thing be for you? If you're looking to begin a fresh ballast install or a ballast upgrade, please check it out. You'll be able to get a good first impression on which bags might best fit, how they'll influence trim, and if you're having custom sacks built, how much they might weigh.

To download, go to http://www.epicmarine.com/how_to.html and right-click and then Save As on the "Epic Ballast Calculator" link. It's about 2 megs.

I'd welcome any feedback good or bad once you've tried it. You need Excel 97 or better. If you're interested in the sheet, I'll be happy to give a hand. Thanks Psyclone for hosting the page and all the other stuff you do for us Tucker owners. Here's some caps:

Instructions:
Instructions

V-drive Calculator (this is the heart of the workbook):
V-drie calculator

A portion of the sac listing:
Sac table

A wide-angle view of the calculator page, showing all the sacs from the sac listing (d-drive shown):
D-drive calculator

The calculator page (nothing fancy, but if you've spent any time going between cu.in. to cu.ft. to gallons to pounds, you'll appreciate how simple this is):
Calculators

If you want to adapt this to your hull, start with an image like this:
Overhead view


Cheers!!!!

 
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