horrible boatbuilding practices coming to light

[brian.cunningham]

These people should be put in JAIL!

Brian T. Cunningham, EIT

In a message dated 2/6/2006 1:11:37 AM Eastern Standard Time, charlie@signaldesign.net writes:
A Florida surveyor's report of heavily damaged boats that shouldn't
have been damaged. Apparently some builders have been using putty for
coring and loose fiberglass mat here and there, and still calling their
boats "fiberglass" or "built with advanced composites."

Worth a look: http://www.yachtsurvey.com/Fiberglass_Boats.htm

Charlie

[Paul Girouard]

Well heres a use for those used up boats , outhouse's , this is kind of cool looking / odd. http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1552972283.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Better than fire wood I guess. Paul

[Victor]

This is a great site. You can feast for hours on his accounts of grossly overpriced boats literally falling apart. Interesting how he refuses to name the material that he does see. He doesn't call it wood, although some of it looks like plywood. Some of it just looks like styrofoam.

[ssor]

I think that there is a plus side to this. I have long worried about being in a collision with one of these go-fast boats with an idiot for a skipper. Now I won't worry so much! I think that mine would survive. I'd just have to rescue the nut that ran into me.

[Tom Robb]

Polyester mites.
Global warming has caused them to mutate :eek:

[Peter Malcolm Jardine]

The big problem would be the fix... yoicks... How do you repair a structure whose whole substance was it's original build. No wonder they write them off.

The banking industry and their 20 year loans might be interested in this stuff too. :eek: ;)

[George Roberts]

Remember that if who build like the photos aer inspected, home builders will be inspected.

Inspections of home built boats may put an end to home built boats. (Not my goal, but perhaps the only way to ensure safety of boats.)

[Victor]

How could this be a big secret?

[ssor]

For ceramic tile installations I use a fiber cement board that has the same appearance as the cores on those broken boats. Has the industry become controlled by the accounting and marketing departments? I saw a boat a couple of summers age that had green paint rubs on the starboard bow and had a rather large tear in the hull just below the shear. The boat disappeared a few days later, I never heard what became of it.

[Ken Hutchins]

George, read the article. There is no mention of home built boats. The issues the surveyor is writing about are with boats built by big corporations.

[L.W. Baxter]

Didn't John B report on a New Zealand boat built of guano? :D

Maybe that "putty" is bat sh-t.

[George Roberts]

Ken Hutchins ---

When the big companies are regulated, the home built boats will be regulated. (Difficult to read my post with a ll the spelling errors.)

[Ian McColgin]

Pascoe is surprised?

This shoddy approach has been endemic in the searaybaylinerized approach for as long as I recall them. Open up a 20 year old cheap tupperware power boat, if you can find one.

Interestingly, hulls so made are a little better made on the very bottom and in the straked deep V shape are actually fairly durable where they need to be. The designs are so up in the air that no one takes them really to sea anyway.

Sail boats are less likely to be so badly made as the rigging stresses would tear their hearts out. But you still find fillers and foams in all too many tupperware sail boats, often as anchors for what should be bulkheads.

There have always been cheap, nearly disposable boats for their limited purposes. It's not like the birchbark canoe or the three plank bateau had to be bits of perfection after all.

I don't like the low-end frozen snot boats - calling them tupperware denigrates a useful product and FS is generic enough to cover these things - but they serve their purposes and the engineering has complied with such standards are there are.

To repeat: Anyone who has been around anywhere at least since the 80's has seen this trend.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

Very well put. In Britain there was a rash of low priced small sailing boats for home completion in the 70's and 80's; these partly masked the trend for us, because they were so grim in other respects - ours was more of a cottage industry, after all.

[ssor]

Somehow I think that OSB cores would be an improvement. :eek:

[Henning 4148]

Well, if anything it's the result of the "low cost - big interior - high performance" fashion which is pressing for cheap light boats. And that trend has been promoted throughout most of the mag's for years and years.

"We had the chance to sail the new cruiser racer by xyz and it goes like the clappers, doesn't cost a lot and offers berths for 7 on a boatlenght of 26 feet. The only thing we found missing was a second toilet ... "

If you start with a very light hull, you need less sail area which means you can get away with a lighter mast and lighter rigging which ... and so on and so on reduces cost.

The same applies for power boats - if you start with a light hull, you can get away with a smaller engine which reduces initial cost and fuel consumption at the same speed etc etc.

Now, as it has to be cheap as well, designers become both inventive and also start to design cost and weight out with the help of computers ... . And within the design envelope, it tends to work. Pitty punctual loads are apparently no longer part of the design envelope though, as they do occur in real life from time to time ... .