2017 saw a huge range of very different projects.

I hate it when you look at companies "latest news" and it's from a year ago, so I have let myself down here a bit. My only excuse was it was quite a busy year...

The vast majority of the initial work I was lucky enough to be involved with in 2017 was with Ben Scott-Geddes from (an Italian OEM), carrying on helping them develop some composite parts for certain road cars. Much as I would like to say what cars they are, I cant.... All I can say is that the study was extremely successful, with the finished parts costing very close to the aluminum parts whilst improving the performance of the car. Which was the initial aim of the project.

I was also lucky enough to help our Ben Ainslie's LR BAR team with the development of their final race spec steering wheels for their America's Cup Race boat. Once again, not much I can say on that project either, apart from to say that as far as I believe, they made it on the final boat!

In mid March, I was contacted by Neil Cheston, who has started a business called Kabina, who are creating great new homes for the UK's floodzones. I have been working closely with both Neil and Guy Lane in creating some of the basic concepts for them, and looking at some of the mass and geometry aspects to make sure the houses all float at the correct time.

In amoungst doing these bigger projects, I have been working woth Simon Fry and his various projects with Provezza. We did some "NVH tweeks" for the TP52 and some work on the Dragon.

As per the last few years, we have been lucky to carry on all the work we have been doing with Antony Dodworth, from Bright Lite Structures. This work has predominatly been on the various aerospace projects he is working on, doing some of the part and tooling design for him.

And finally, and perhaps most exciting, in September 2017 I was introduced to Rachael Tapp, who had founded a start up business called SmartSail Systems and joined her business as a shareholder and director to help her get the SmartSail devices into production.

In simple terms, SmartSail is the only product available for all sailors that monitors the usage, wear & tear and location of all the sails. It is a small device that is fitted to a sail by the sailmaker, and has the sail ID encoded within (i.e. when the sail was made, what materials, what mould etc, how many days before service, how many days before replacement etc). Using the Smart Sail App, the sailors and sailmakers can then continually track the usage and location of that sail. It monitors such items as hours of flogging, hours in UV, where the sail is, temperature range, how may tacks etc. This data is also processed through bespoke cloud based algorithms that we have created with the University of Southampton, which will say how much “life” is left in the sail in relation to the type of sail cloth and hours on UV and flogging etc. Much the same as your car tells you when to get it serviced.

We are both working hard, throughout this year with the business and will be going into full production early in 2019.....

All in all, a very good year.