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  1. #1
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    Default Michael Storer's Interesting Boat Links

    Howdy All,

    I will occasionally put an interesting new boaty link up in this thread (now I can edit old threads I can simply add to this first post).

    Anyone can suggest stuff by posting here too and I will move anything exemplary to this first post with a mini review.

    From the earliest (and there is more information about each of these further down the thread).

    Furled Sails - They call themselves the "World's First Sailing Podcast" but there are heaps of archived interviews with some very big names in the wooden boat movement as well as some very interesting smaller names too. Beuhler, Micro Cruisers, PDRacers, Jerry Cornell, the amazing Watertribe and much more.

    http://www.sailingsource.com/cherub/idx-chbuild.php
    The boats are high tech, but they have included wood as one of the very successful alternatives. If you want to build a carbon mast for your GIS ... this site is where to find out how.

    National Maritime website seems to be down but...
    http://www.anmm.gov.au
    I saw a little photo in The Australian promoting an exhibition of toy boats at the National Maritime Museum in Darling Harbour. It looked like it might be a great exhibition if you are closer to Sydney. Real proper little boats. Also make sure you see Taipan - the radical 1960's 18 foot skiff from Ben Lexcen (Bob Miller) that has been restored.

    If you are restoring a trad built boat that was built in Australia there is a heap of information that allows you to work out what sizes things were in the original boat and some idea of modern substitutes. It is a fabulous historical resource - so if you are repairing or restoring a commercial or fishing vessel have a look at the Construction - Wood after logging in below. Please have a look at my comments below for some context.
    http://www.nmsc.gov.au/uslcode_disclaimer.html

    I have to get to the bottom of it ... but there is a festival in Taiwan that involves burning ... this.

    The link to all the pics are here
    You can see the full pics at my friend MaoPoPo's flickr site. I generally don't agree with burning boats, quite often there is somone lurking in the wings who is looking wistfully at it and thinking "I would take it - really". But where a boat is designed to be burned!!! There are some great pictures here - look at the detail of the boat - some of the best Junk pictures I have seen anywhere! MaoPoPo has some great photos in general - I love her vegetable pics - but she and her friends do a fair bit of Kayaking around Taiwan.

    http://www.yachting-history.org/english.htm
    A mindbogglingly gorgeous site full of mindbogglingly gorgeous boats from tween war Germany. Also articles etc if you can read them! We love Manfred Curry.

    http://www.woodworkforums.ubeaut.com...375#post802375
    More Pics from Taiwan ... this time of traditionally built by the original (non Chnese) inhabitants of the Islands.
    Pictures are by my friend Mao who took the Junk pictures above. The boats are partially SEWN together. Her pics give some of the details.
    Last edited by Boatmik; 7th September 2008 at 07:14 PM.

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  3. #2
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    Default

    This is what conventional sailing classes should be doing!!!

    For people interested in construction and design and DIY boats it is a magnificent resource.

    This fantastic site gives a number of construction methods for Cherub class racing dinghies.



    The boats are high tech, but they have included wood as one of the very successful alternatives. If you want to build a carbon mast for your GIS ... this site is where to find out how.
    http://www.sailingsource.com/cherub/idx-chbuild.php

    Also they have a wonderful detailed history of the development of the design from John Spencer's original breakthrough boat to the most recent raceboats.
    http://www.sailingsource.com/cherub/idx-chistory.php

    One of the interesting features is that simplified hullforms are starting to appear - quite flat bottomed and I am a little struck by some of how some of the features reflect the design of the Goat Island Skiff and Beth.





    It is not all that surprising really - the GIS and Beth both had a starting point with modern racing dinghy design (Skiff Moths and NS14s having the biggest effect), but with every attempt taken to wring out the expense. So the Goat is very similar in terms of rocker and also the widths of the bottom panel.

    And just to be a real smarty pants. The Goat finished hullweight is lighter per unit length (hehe)

    Best wishes
    Michael
    Last edited by Boatmik; 24th March 2008 at 03:50 PM.

  4. #3
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    Default

    Howdy All,

    I saw a little photo in The Australian promoting an exhibition of toy boats at the National Maritime Museum in Darling Harbour.

    It looked like it might be a great exhibition if you are closer to Sydney.

    Real proper little boats.

    The Museum website seems to be down - but here is the link for when it corrects itself.

    http://www.anmm.gov.au

    Don't forget to go to the Small Boat Annex which is about 150metres to the North of the main museum building. It is in the closest end of the building along the edge of the wharf.



    At the moment they have the quite nicely restored TAIPAN - one of Ben Lexcens (then Bob Miller) revolutionary lightweight 18ft skiffs.

    Some of the plywood looks a bit different from what Lexcen would have chosen but the boat just looks great - the mast is gorgeous hollow timber construction.

    Michael Storer

  5. #4
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    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by Boatmik View Post
    It is not all that surprising really - the GIS and Beth both had a starting point with modern racing dinghy design (Skiff Moths and NS14s having the biggest effect), but with every attempt taken to wring out the expense. So the Goat is very similar in terms of rocker and also the widths of the bottom panel
    When I was building the Goat, one of my old neighbours (in his eighties) was a skiffie from the olden days when men were men. He reckoned he'd spent so much time bailing for his crew when he was a lad, that he'd bailed out Moreton Bay three times, but I digress.

    He stood there as if besotted when he first saw the Goat Boat coming together. I asked him if there was something wrong and he said it was just amazing. He'd always believed that curved bottomed boats were just a passing fad.

    Just a gimmick, he said.

    Each morning he used to pass our house on the way to buy a paper, "to make sure his name wasn't in the funeral notices".

    Sadly, it appeared one day, just few days before we launched, so he never got to come for a ride!

    Cheers,

    P


  6. #5
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    Hey all
    What a sad story Midge. These old fellas are/were a store house and treasure of information of the past. Met one old guy who was an old boy at the school were I used to teach. I spent a 'good' hour with him as he told tales of his youth. I can still see the mischievous glint of the boy in his eyes.

    I digress.. Your Goat boat is a work of art. No wonder he dropped in each day to see it being built.

    Cheers
    Phil

  7. #6
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    Default We all have our time.

    Be glad you knew him. We all have our time then it's over and we pass the gauntlet on to others and fade from memory. I'm sure his visits added to his enjoyment and it seems they made some nice memories for you too.

    CN
    Onward through the fog.

  8. #7
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    OK, a story about another tradition.

    The USL CODE used to be the guideline for building all commercial vessels.

    Now it is a great resource if you are restoring an older Australian built commercial boat. If the deck is missing or looks too thin ... you can look up the charts and find out how thick it should be in traditional plank or in ply. Same for missing coach-house structure or a transom.

    How fantastic is that!

    HOWEVER!!!

    The USL Code is one of the reasons for Australia's lack of competitiveness internationally. It really dates from an era when most boats were built the same way and as it was the only OZ standard it became the only way. The strengths of everything are bases on LENGTH rather than taking displacement into account and assuming the hull is being planked - so requires lots of frames and stringers that we know are not necessary for modern timber boatbuilding.

    HOWEVER you cannot leave them out of a trad structure!!!

    It is all being updated at the moment - a huge process - and it is about time. Thanks to all the sympathetic Bureaucrats that are pushing the changes through! Bless your cotton socks!

    I've seen people jumping crazy hoops with modern structures to get them through. Trying to get a plywood composite catamaran through survey was just crazy. Initially there would be the go-ahead - "yeah it will be OK, mate". Then later after the hulls were built ... "oh, sorry, but you have to make the hulls thicker to comply with USL - but it is OK ... Just add more glass". So the poor owner had to build another boat around his existing boat and double the hull weight because the "strength" is not the same as inch and a quarter planking. With warning it would have been better to increase the ply and strip thickness as it is around a third of the weight of the same thickness of glass.

    But with trad construction the planking is held together so poorly (ribs and fastenings) that it is weaker in every calculable and empirical way. Application of the rule for modern boats was just a repeated disaster.

    It is the same reason the DF Mundoos for hire had three 6 x 3s running the length of the bottom on the outside - "needs the strength there". No matter that they had built a 50 footer without them a couple of years earlier and it had been craned out on a couple of slings about 12 feet apart in the middle of the boat - try THAT with a planked boat - but not an iota of visible movement on that long thin light plywood box.

    There was conservatism in the application of the rule and then often a capricious response to the final boat. I once designed a hire and drive boat and jumped design hoops trying to manage the stability criterion - the full legal number of passengers standing on the side deck at the same time. Worked it out using the computer and worked out that around 200kg of ballast was required to meet the criterion. The builder left it out. A bunch of blokes in white overalls rolled down on the appointed day jumped aboard ... "you want to licence for 6? She'll take 8 easy". Licence for 8 followed.

    Moral is - as useful as the USL code is for restoring traditional boats it is almost useless for working out hull scantlings for modern construction boats.

    However I often find myself following the requirements for bulkheads, coachouses, transoms and decks. So there are good bits too.

    USL CODE
    Just say you "agree" and then look for Construction - Wood. Good stuff on steel and alloy too, but I am not able to comment on the usefulness of those codes.

    Best Wishes
    Michael

  9. #8
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    Default

    If you seriously want to get a half valuable boat certified without bothering with all that silly USL stuff, there is a way.

    It's how the composite ferries and work boats manage it:
    Det Norske Veritas

    And that's my useful link of the day.

    Cheers,

    P

  10. #9
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    Default

    The system has generally been more liberalised in Australia, with a large variety of alternative systems now accepted with few problems. American Bureau of Shipping, Lloyds, Germanischer Lloyds, Veritas. There are also Japanese standards I believe. Naturally enough all these areas have had a bit more of a shipbuilding industry so that has enabled more cutting edge rules to be developed. Australia really has benefitted from the high speed ferry boom of the 80s and 90s where we have had a position amongst the world's best (or even well ahead of them at times) which has fed into the current update that is under way.

    You can probably imagine the sudden overhead for local professionals and bureaucrats in getting to know how to handle all these different standards.

    eeeek! But I can't complain - lots of choice is better than no choice.

    MIK

  11. #10
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    I have to get to the bottom of it ... but there is a festival in Taiwan that involves burning ... this. Now Explained

    The link to all the pics are here
    You can see the full pics at my friend MaoPoPo's flickr site. I generally don't agree with burning boats, quite often there is somone lurking in the wings who is looking wistfully at it and thinking "I would take it - really". But where a boat is designed to be burned!!!

    There are some great pictures here - look at the detail of the boat - some of the best Junk pictures I have seen anywhere! MaoPoPo has some great photos in general - I love her vegetable pics - but she and her friends do a fair bit of Kayaking around Taiwan.
    Last edited by Boatmik; 7th September 2008 at 07:18 PM.

  12. #11
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    I am trying to find out what it all means. The boat looks pretty accurate in many ways - but is obviously more decoration than substance.

    The Taiwanese have an interesting take on boat development - you can see a page I put together on them using traditional bamboo raft methods to make big boats out of industrial PVC tubes and monofilament strapping.


    http://www.storerboatplans.com/Taiwa...aiwanboat.html

    or the small local fishing boats



    Love the use of the traditional stern to guard the outboard!!!!

    Mid sized fishing boats are narrow



    And carry powerful lamps



    Meaning you can sit in a teashop at the historic Juifen and look up the coast and see the stars in the sky and the stars (boats) in the water.



    I plan to go back to Taiwan soon! Just love it. These are the bunch of friends that decided to adopt me and take me around the Northern part of Taiwan.



    More pics on my Flickr set here
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/boatmik...7605613266840/

    MIK
    Last edited by Boatmik; 19th July 2008 at 02:40 AM.

  13. #12
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    hi Mik, thanks for all the interesting onfo that you put up on the site. I Love reading through the various sites and getting new ideas, info etc. I am planning to start building a 12 ft wooden boat within the next week, Would have started today but don't like working in 4 deg temp.

    Cheers
    Art.

  14. #13
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    Howdy Art,

    Thanks for appreciating all this stuff. In a way it is all of little importance, but at the same time it is pretty damn fascinating.

    It is a nice thing I think to inhabit this harmless byroad!

    Thanks and BEST WISHES

    Michael

  15. #14
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    Some interesting sites members might enjoy

    Sven Yrvind is building a Paradox develoment in foam. Still of interest due to hull shape and Sven's belief in Chine Runners on "box boat" hulls.

    http://www.yrvind.com/present_project.html

    Duckworks article on modified birdsmouth spars.

    http://www.duckworksmagazine.com/08/...outh/index.htm

    Carbon mast making also from Duckworks

    http://www.duckworksmagazine.com/07/...mast/index.htm

    Brian.

  16. #15
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    Thanks for those links Brian,

    I had a look.

    The Pardox stuff is great - Matt Leyden has really developed a new type of boat capable of quite serious sailing feats but costing very little because of the small volume.



    Original website http://www.microcruising.com/

    Rule 1 ... volume costs!

    I still have strong reservations about the chine runner concept. There have been some fitted here and there does not seem to be the performance improvement suggested by the written material.

    I hope if people want to discuss this particular concept they will add posts to the thread linked to in the above paragraph as there is a significant discussion there.

    My feeling is that the deepness of the hull might make an awful lot of difference. Hull depth can provide quite a lot of lateral resistance by itself - so the deep laden hulls of the Paradox type might be able to gain a good advantage - but not so good for shallow boats even if the runners are quite wide. Until someone sticks them on a racing boat ... we just won't know.

    Also I think that external chine logs have similar proportion to the Paradox fins .. and many of those boats need centreboards or leeboards.

    If you look at the longer thread above you can see, despite my doubts about the "runners" that I think that the Paradox approach is a fantastic design package of a highly innovative boat that ACTUALLY WORKS!!! There have been many significant cruises offshore achieved with these boats.

    Carbon Spars - Good article with some significant technical weaknesses ... Main point is that carbon spars can be backyarded very successfully. The Cherub links in the first post have information on this too.



    The article here however strikes me as a particularly inefficient use of carbon and they have probably made the stick much more expensive and heavier than it needs to be. You can see the difference in one of the pics of the diameters of the two masts.

    A square stick is much stiffer than a round one of similar width of cross section and this carbon stick is much smaller. So this means the amount of carbon has to be very great to get the right stiffness. I would reckon they could halve their carbon and epoxy budget on this project (and the weight!!!) simply by starting with a bigger initial diameter - the Cherub articles explain how.

    The other thing is they haven't weighed the difference ... often a small difference or a smaller diameter can make something subjectively feel significantly lighter - like I remember getting my first minimum weight NS14 - it felt so light to pick up and totally different on the water but 140lbs vs 148lbs - I would always prefer a measurement. Bathroom scales are ok providing there is a person's weight on there at the same time to bring the scales into the right range.

    The second technical flaw is
    I think it’s about what I aimed for – more flexible in gusts to reduce the heeling forces, but stiff enough to keep a good sail shape in a fresh breeze.
    The mast on a lug rig should be reasonably stiff otherwise the mast bends and the halyard drops making the sail bag and twist. The spar that needs to be able to bend is the YARD along the top of the sail and to a lesser extent the back end of the boom.

    Reading the article shows that they have not followed the epoxy literature in their general boatbuilding for the hull - they add acetone to the epoxy - which means it is only as effective as PAINT for keeping water out and also use 1:1 epoxies which are a bad choice because all sorts of extenders have to be added to make this mix work. They should have forgotten the epoxy completely and saved that money if they are going to add acetone to it.

    Birdsmouth spars

    Just to show I am not a complete grumblebum!!! This is an excellent article. Only caveat would be that the normal method does allow easier alignment of the staves. But this one allows a significant materials saving.

    Thanks for the links!!!

    Best wishes
    Michael

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