Do I really need chainplates that cost more than my boat...

Something depressing to go with that tuna sandwich, news in the warm enough for you department, and they expect us to trust them with our money...

Let's say your boat project calls for chainplates...

Just for illustrative purposes let's say you have a CAL 34...

Well, you could buy some stainless steel, bronze, or alloy (might as well mention carbon fiber while we're at it) and make them up yourself... This is pretty simple and the least expensive option.

You could, however, buy off-the-shelf pre-done chainplates if you're able to find the right size and scantlings, which is harder than you'd expect.

You could hire a local machinist to make the chainplates...

Or you could go to some marine enterprise that specializes in such things...

There is always a simple and inexpensive way to do something on a boat. In our case we bought stainless, a few extra drill bits, and a cheap drill press for less than $100 all up. A half days' labor was the sweat equity damage.

Now, being compulsive, I did check into all of the other various options and the price spread of all of the various options went from about $100 to a rather astounding $3200.

Yeah $3200!

The $3200 option (in titanium and polished as smooth as a baby's butt) would not actually have done the job of holding the mast up any better than the DIY 304 stainless chainplates we went with. I might as well add that not too long ago a friend apparently lost his mast due to a very expensive titanium mast fitting failure which makes me wonder if titanium is actually the right way to go at all...

OK, the thing is, the plain simple non-welded chainplates that were put on the boat when new were 304 stainless and they have held up all these years finest kind (as for the two welded chainplates well... that's another story for another day). So replacing with pretty much original spec does not seem to be a bad choice and I should be able to expect forty odd years of service... Not bad for $100 and a little sweat so you could color me a happy camper.

Chainplates are just a single example of how much (or little) a project can cost and how just one decision can affect the cost of building or rehabbing a boat... Just about every task in a boatbuilding or refab project has the same sort of decision making process and options so making the wrong choice can make or break a project.

Which is one reason I tend to reread "Buehler's Backyard Boatbuilding" on a regular basis because it keeps me grounded and damps the urge to do something silly like getting custom titanium chainplates which leads to titanium turnbuckles and on it goes till my budget is dead as a doornail...

Listening to Warren Zevon

So it goes...