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Hobie Double Grommet Guide
History The Hobie 16 is a strict one-design class. This means that for racing, all boats need to be identical and no change can be made in the class that would make any older boats obsolete. Some changes were made that made the boat better without a substantial cost increase and without making old boats obsolete. On the original Hobie trampolines the grommet spacing was 6" between grommets. This spacing turned out to be too wide and there were grommet failures in the trampolines. The load was not spread out over enough grommets resulting in one grommet taking too much load and thus ripping out. They couldn't change the spacing because this would make old boats obsolete. The retrofit was developed whereby you would ‘double grommet’ the trampoline and the grommet spacing would be 3” between grommets. With this system all older boats could be retrofitted for a low cost and the problem was fixed as there were twice as many grommets on the trampoline. The problem is there doesn’t need to be grommets every 3” on the whole trampoline but that was the solution they had to provide. This change was added to the class rules way back in 1983. Grommet spacing on trampolines from SLO Sail and Canvas What we have on our trampolines is grommets every 5” down the center lacing and we use a 4” spacing for the aft lacing. This is the ‘correct’ spacing. We have never had any grommet failures on any of our trampolines. This number and spacing of grommets allows the trampolines to be tightened very tight with no problems. We also stagger the grommets on our trampoline so you may not need to run 2 different ropes down the middle (like shoelaces almost) that some people do with the stock Hobie trampolines. |
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