Designing to build...

Something to think about, Robert Reich makes a depressing case, and, personally, I think it's my patriotic duty to treat politicians with as much rudeness and scorn as they deserve...

As things go, I'm more of a boatbuilder rather than a designer of boats. That said, the line between the two can often be some kind of a seriously blurry no-mans land.

For instance, I like sharpies for a variety of reasons. They're fast to build, have an unbeatable turn of performance if done right (providing cost is part of the equation), and they're cheap... What's not to like?

The problem I come across is most designers designing sharpies don't actually build them and, as a result, they tend to be problematic to build as well as expensive. Of course, this problem is not confined to just sharpies but pretty much anything that floats. Non-optimum use of materials, silly amounts of needful man hours, and exotic materials all add to the problem but it is SOP (standard operating procedure) in this maritime world we live in...

Everyone knows I admire the work of Phil Bolger and I've built a bunch of his designs. He was a rare duck in the world of boat design because he seemed to get the construction mostly right yet was not a boatbuilder himself... Apparently, he used to have some very good friends who were boatbuilders and, I guess, he may have actually listened to their feedback from time to time.

On our Loose Moose 2, a 38-foot sharpie Phil designed for us, there were any number of ways a builder could improve on the design to make it easier to build and, to some extent, less expensive but those changes were small improvements rather than re-design.

Of late, I've been thinking about clever (you might even say c-u-n-n-i-n-g-p-l-a-n) methods of building sharpies. The trick, I think, is to think structurally first and then see, once you've sorted that out, what sort of sharpie that structural method will get you. Just a hint but you might want to think monocoque construction on steroids.

But, more about that later over on VolksCruiser...

Listening to Lio

So it goes...