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Pros and cons of steel sailboats

909K views 5K replies 127 participants last post by  Faster 
#1 ·
I'm thinking about making the leap from fiberglass to steel for our next sailboat. We want to do some far flung cruising - maybe even circumnavigate. Our present boat is a 1977 Tartan 37 and while we love it - since we've had a child and possibly will have another one on the way it might get a bit small for a liveaboard situation.
This summer I drove a big, old steel tour boat around the finger lakes and started thinking that steel might be a good way to get my family around the big marble.
I've spent a week in the Caribbean on a glorious aluminium boat but have never sailed a steel one, so I have lots of questions about their performance as cruising boats?
What are some of the better designers to keep and eye out for?
How good are they in the hot climates?
Are there any extra dangers in lightning?
Thanks for any and all advice you can give.
 
#1,339 ·
Now THAT is kind of weird. :confused: I've never before heard of a composer who couldn't play.

Looking at your list of designers made me think - that covers well over a century and I think you've listed pretty well all the majors.

Pretty rarefied company you keep. :) I think the profession fits the term "arcane" quite well. (or vice versa).
 
#1,338 ·
"I once completely rewired a large pipe organ. But I don't know how to play it. "

That's a shame. Think of the fun.
You could play some Buxtehude. Buxtehude agreed to teach J.S. Bach but only if Bach would marry his daughter. Buxtehude's daughter was notoriously ugly and Bach passed on the offer.
 
#1,341 · (Edited)
Jon:

Lots of composers composed for instruments they could not play. Mozart wrote a lot of horn concertos but he did not play the French horn. His buddy did.

Little Bobby Schumann could play the piano just fine. But there is a theory that he wrecked his hands using a contraption designed to stretch his finger reach. It is known that he did use this odd device. It's not clear if that's what lead to him stopping playing. But, he was a very weird guy. Ended up committing himself to an asylum where he eventually died. Some think he starved himself to death. Others think he died of syphilis.

Bobby's wife, Clara, was a very famous virtuoso in an age where it was very unusual for a woman to be a professional musician. She was also an accomplished composer when very few women were composers. Brahms lived with Bobby and Clara. Think of that.
 
#1,344 ·
Thanks Bob - I read your post as he couldn't PLAY, not just the piano. I doubt any of the composers of symphony music could play every instrument.
 
#1,343 ·
At the risk of being mundane ( above posts where delightful and reminds me Beethoven continued to compose after he lost his hearing and the Wizard of Bristol kept drawing after he was too old to sail) wish to return to frameless construction. Seems practical way to increase plate thickness while eliminating frames so total hull weight remains in "acceptable" limits. What I wonder is:
Is there a upper and lower limit to LOA where it just doesn't make sense?
Why don't we hear about this technique more in Aluminum construction? Being easier to bend and of significantly lighter weight seems LOA limitations are less likely to apply. Forget where but seem to remember a new sailboat manufacturer using a modification of this technique. Also wonder if a female mold could be constructed and with a hydraulic press using Al ( or possibly steel but more force involved) a production line of sailboats could be constructed at very reasonable cost.
Just wondering
 
#1,352 ·
I am not sure that the limit on going frameless is length as much as it is displacement.

As a boat gets heavier, it needs more sail area if it is going to sail well. If the boat is going to stand up that bigger sail plan then it needs more stability. The combination results in the keel connection loads and rigging loads increasing. And as these loads increase, it gets harder to disburse them into the skin without distorting the skin, and so load patches need to be added. (Think of it this way, a sail is a single membrane monocoque structure, and so as the sail gets larger bigger stress patches need to be added at the tack, head, clew and reef points.)

Like the sail analogy, on a small boat you might be able to simply use heavier hull plating (sailcloth) rather than add stress patches but as the boat gets heavier the concentrated loads increase more extensively than the skin loads.

At some point, merely adding stress patches aren't enough and so knees and a minimum amount of frames get added at the highest stress locations rather than end up with a hull that is absurdly thick. Eventually as the boat gets heavier still these added frames end up concentrating loads in narrow bands and so additional structure is added to move the loads more effectively around the skin.

A good example of this phenomina is early fiberglass boats. When they first started building fiberglass boats, they wanted them to be frameless. The US government had done a lot of research on FG during WW II and the early designers knew that fiberglass was very string in bending, but not very stiff. Unlike the mythology, the early FG boats had thick hulls to deal with flexure. (Unfortunately to get that thickness early boats generally used a number of methods to bulk up the laminate which undermined the strength of the laminate especially over time. but that's another story..)

When you look at these earliest FG boats, even though they were very heavily built, it was not unusual to see dimples in the topsides where rigging loads distorted the hulls. Pretty quickly designers and builders started adding knews and structural bulkheads. By the mid to late1970's fully framed FG boats became the norm.

It is a similar problem with steel, as the boat gets longer and heavier, at some point the choice becomes to add frames, end up with an absurdly heavy hull, design a way to distribute the loads with the geometry of the hull and/or deck, or live with distortions.

There actually have been production aluminum power craft. Probably a decade or so ago, I attended a lecture on new aluminum Coast Guard boats. The aluminum sheets were precisely cut by a computer driven cutter. The electronically developed plate drawings allowed the yard to develop very efficient 'nesting plans' which allowed the carefull layout of the individual parts on the plate so there was very little waste. The cut plans included small tabs which allowed the precise aligment of the parts as the boat was assembled. Bulkheads served as part of the structure and also helped precisely control the final plate shapes. Very impressive to see.

I think that aluminum lends itself to the newer hull forms and so is more popular in Europe where they have embrassed the Open Class style boats more than we have here.

Jeff
 
#1,345 ·
Out:
I think some of the French builders have tried way of making alu into a production material. They have done some very nice boats but there doesn't seem to be much of a market for them. I think today's sailor is wary of metal boats. GRP is pretty stable in a salt water environment.

I leave it to Brent to tell us what the lower limit LOA is for steel. I would guess that it would depend on the desgn and using Brent's method you could build a nice 11,000 lb.
30'er in steel, maybe less, if that was your material of choice. Brent's method opens the door to lighter steel building. I look forward to Brent's opinion on this.
 
#1,368 ·
The first and smallest origami boat I have built and designed was a 26 footer. She sailed well, and the owner was very happy with her. One sailed from BC to Australia, where she was sold to her latest owners, who are very happy Aussies, whom I met in Comox once. They sent a picture of her to Pacific yachting, which they published. She cruises around Brisbane, last report ,with the name "Misty Blue". Winston sailed a 27 ft version of this boat thru the NW passage, documented in his crew's books "Arctic Odyssey " By Len Sherman and "The NW Passage on Ten Dollars a Day" , by George Hone, who recently retired from West Marine in Nanaimo. The story is also in back issues of Pacific Yachting. Winston's daughter also has one, in which she has just left for Mexico. She also worked at West Marine in Nanaimo.
I think 26 feet is around the minimum for steel, but smaller origami boats in aluminium are definitely practical.
 
#1,346 ·
There are several French boat builders with a considerable production, I mean production boats. Aluminium is probably the material more used on French voyage boats and most of the French that want to voyage and do that on other type of boat do that mostly because aluminium boats are more expensive.

Of course, voyage boats are just a very small part of the global market and they are therefore a small minority even in France, but not in what regards boats designed with voyage in mind.
 
#1,347 ·
One of the gadgets we got from Germany after the war (krupp?) was a huge hydraulic press I heard it was the worlds largest.They had used it to stamp out hulls of U boats. Victoria Machinery Depot used it for years making stuff for pulp and paper mills but never heard of more boat building by that method. Probably due to a resistance to try anything new. Back when I was in my explosives phase, I planed on pressing aluminum into a female concrete mold using overhead Amex charges.Fortunately for the fiber glass canoe and kayak industry I went on to ferro cement. The molds were just too heavy.
 
#1,350 · (Edited)
Steve just built a Boreal 44. It's a boat I looked at before the Outbound. Very sound vessel beautifully executed. Admiral didn't like the feel of interior lay out so dropped off the list. I would have been pleased as punch. Hear what you say about Americans and metal. Knowing that and knowing the cost of the d-mn things when you think some sad day you won't be able to sail any longer metal boats become less attractive. Just easier to sell a boat in your home country when you have swallowed the anchor.
 
#1,354 ·
"A good comparison of stiffness is to consider the way some GRP boats have cheated the rating rules ,by putting a big hydraulic backstay adjuster on, and cranking it until the boat sags and the waterline shortens considerably, for measuring."

Interesting. Can you tell us Brent what rating rules in place since the popular advent of hydraulic backstay adjusters actually measure the waterline?

Cute story but not based on any fact. One of my hobbies is the study of rating rules and their evolution. Better bring your A game to that question.

I was interested in how small a boat you think you could build in your origami method. What's currently the smallest boat you have done?
 
#1,360 · (Edited)
Brent:

The Boeing Surplus Store is now online:

https://surplus.boeing.com/Index.cfm

I've not been looking much lately, and haven't noticed any titanium (The 787 has more Ti than any other previous model.. works better with composites)..

It might be a place where you can see expired rolls of carbon fiber pre-preg, which is probably still good, but you'd need to heat it up to cure it.

I see they are auctioning off 81,000 lbs of Invar.. maybe that could be a new thread regarding the pros and cons of building boats with Invar.

Pro #1: Less of a problem with thermal expansion..

(somebody go next)
 
#1,362 ·
Brent:

The Boeing Surplus Store is now online:

https://surplus.boeing.com/Index.cfm

I've not been looking much lately, and haven't noticed any titanium (The 787 has more Ti than any other previous model.. works better with composites)..

It might be a place where you can see expired rolls of carbon fiber pre-preg, which is probably still good, but you'd need to heat it up to cure it.
Thanks
 
#1,361 ·
The smallest origami boat I have done was my 7 ft6 inch aluminium dingy.
Many small aluminium workboats have been done for decades using origami methods.
Bruce Cope ( of Cope aluminium boats in Parksville) said Hyline Aluminium in Steveston BC , built hundreds in the 70s.
 
#1,363 · (Edited)
Brent: I didn't know that but I'm not surprised. It was there for a long time. I sedf to buy my drawing boards there, $6.00 a piece. They were great boards. I even found spline weights there marked with "747" on them. We got the rudder stove for HEATHER, the two tonner there.

Ok, give?
I'll answer the question for you Brent.
Your story is a silly myth.
Navtec backstay adjusters were the first ones available to the racing fleet other than rare custom made units. These hydraulic backstay adjusters were introduced in the very early '70's, maybe '72. I'd have to check. Doesn't matter because the universal rating rule after 1968 was the IOR. The IOR DOES NOT measure DWL. All the hull measurements for the IOR are taken with the boat OUT OF THE WATER. DWL is not one of these measurements. PHRF does not take ANY in the water measurments.

Cute story but not true.

What I was interested in is how small a steel boat do you think is practical using your method?
 
#1,365 ·
That's kind of a shame that Boeing Surply went online. Most of the fun of shopping there was just rambling about the place looking for odd items. That's how I found my 747 spline weights. They were in a bucket full of odds and ends. I remember seeing a huge pile of tangled drafting machines.
 
#1,371 ·
When I take first time clients to the scrapyard , at first they tip toe daintily thru the piles. An hour later I have to practically drag them away. They don't want to leave .
I have never charged for scrapyard time. That's sport, not work!
 
#1,367 ·
A reliable source says that there are still drafting tables in use at Boeing, but not to many... Along with some spline weights..

The same reliable source once got an old table allocated to him, and it has some late-1960s early 1970s space shuttle drawings.



Pretty cool.
 
#1,373 ·
Nope.. I am quite close to the source. Some of that stuff is still around. I am presently in possession of the documents. Perhaps I will drop by some time and show them to you and have you autograph my book.

(I'll also show you around my boat, of which I am quite fond of (sorry.. Tony Castro design)
 
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