Easy-Clip Aero Spacers

The idea of designing easy to fit and remove Height Spacers came about because of our frustration when having to move them, especially out on the water. They’re always a battle to unclip, sometimes needing two hands, and more often than not they end up in the water, and often sink, having pinged off...

To make them easier to change we thought of adding a pull tab and having looked at that we wondered if we made the nose of the tab an ‘Aero’ shape, and made the other end of the clip a Kammtail (a cut off aerodynamic form), what the drag reduction would be?

Aero Benefit

Using Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) it turned out the drag of a stack of the new spacers was just 19% that of a randomly orientated set of conventional ones and that that would give a top flight Eight a 0.37 metre advantage over a 2K race. The caveat on this is that boats with bow mounted riggers, or riggers with C cups that shield the Oarlocks, would not get these drag reductions.

The spacers are intended for Sweep rowing because on Sculling riggers the collars on the oars can potentially touch them and move them out of alignment.

They are currently available for 13mm Pins and are moulded in a high grade, ultra-tough, Polypropylene so that they float. They are a Registered Design and Patent Pending. They can be used directly above and below Sweep Oarlocks that have inserts between 3 and 5 degrees.