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buying a 60'' steel

4K views 24 replies 7 participants last post by  kbyte 
#1 ·
buying a 60'''' steel

Well me wife and I are looking at buying a steel catch that needs lots of tlc. The hull has been sounded and reads on average 45-4.9. The boat needs so much work but we are willing to put it in along with some hard cash. $82000 will make it ours. I find the stories of the strength of steel at sea and availablity of welders worldwide a plus. However, finance companies tend to shy awy from steel hulls as well as insurance co.s It appears we will have to buy the boat without financing ie home equity. any and all comments much wanted.
 
#2 ·
buying a 60'''' steel

I take a different view point than most! so take it with a grain of SaltWater!60'' is about 20'' more than most couples should attempt,unless its set up like a Dashew''s boat!Most steel boats I''[ve seen except for
Irving Johnson''s 92''Yankee(I did a circle on it at age 12 ) are under rigged.Not enough sail area to sail in winds under 18 to 27 knots.92% of the time you will be dealing with winds under 14 knots.Will she sail under those conditions?I truly do not know?do You???
RIGHT NOW!! the earth is going through one of its change cycles!!I would venture to say
that 5 to 10 years from now;the pilot charts of yesterday will be as valuable as Tits on a Boar!How will your boat meet the unceartainties of tomorrow??ENUF SAID!!
 
#4 ·
buying a 60'''' steel

Ahoy captain, first mistake you will be making is using somebody''s elses cash certianly not hard cash. Equity loans such as the one you suggest with your primary assets as collateral my leave you with a steel house in a boatyard . Next is the fact that altough the strength of steel is remarkable so is the initial preperation and daily maintenance. Essentially you have a slow melting sailing fizzy tablet in the sea of mounting intrest rates. Sounds to me like you may have misjudged your wife as well but not to worry send me some pictures I might be able to make her an offer as a galley slave in me ship. Ahoy thomas OZONE? What you just fall out of your tree ? Forgot to hug when you type? Big Red 56 the Pirate of Pine Island.
 
#6 ·
buying a 60'''' steel

Hello Capt Jon,
A steel hull boat is an excellent choice. Steel is a more popular choice than you think at first glance. If you look around you''ll see that for over fifty foot just about all commerial boats you see will be steel. The reason for that is you can buy good steel anywhere and with a reasonable amount of practice most anybody can be a good welder. Mind you you''ll need to practice on scrap, not on your new hull.

When you walk on a steel boat it doesn''t make the boat move around because your weight is not significant compared to the weight of the boat. This makes for very comfortable motion on the water. It also has a tendency to be a bit slower than boats with the same waterline.

If this boat was built by someone like Thomas Colvin or Merritt Walters/Rover Corp. or any of the professional outfits it''s probably OK. If it was homemade i would inspect it alot closer, so as not to purchase something of a learn to weld project. Not to say that homemade boats can''t be built correctly, because they can. Go on the inside and try to find seams and inspect the welding.

Welding is fairly simple if it looks really good it probably is, if it looks rough it probably isn''t. I know alot of people that will tell you that there welds may not look good but they will hold and that is unmittigatted hog wash. If a weld doesn''t look excellent it is not. It should look like a roll of dimes laying down with very even simetrical spacing.

Also finding financing for any homemade boat is difficult. If you look around you''ll find, numberous Colvins, a few Walters, fewer Topper Hermanson''s, etc, available for sale that you shouldn''t have any problem getting financing for. You may have to look around for your financing, but no one buys a commercial steel boat and pays cash, it doesn''t make good business sense. So there has to be some loan vendors that will loan on steel boats. You might want to call some of the boat yards that build out of steel and ask them were you could obtain financing.
Good Luck
Dirt
 
#8 ·
buying a 60'''' steel

BigRed56, Daily maintenance on a slow melting sailing fizzy tablet?????
Ever hear of corten steel and 2 part epoxy paint????????
Steel boats rust from the inside out. If they are built right and easy access to all areas of the bilge, the boat should last for many, many years.
 
#10 ·
buying a 60'''' steel

Ahoy, dancy: I refer you to ussailing.org, member #303497B, to my age, 58, my previous employment as a fluid engineer, then 30 years in management, including 15 years living over seas, drilling oil wells in the ocean. Finally, I refer you to Webster''s Dictionary, the meaning of muse. I also remind you it is an open forum and we are all free agents. If you don''t like my sharing, don''t read it.
 
#12 ·
buying a 60'''' steel

Ahoy, dancy: "No disrespect intended" is a qualification. It preceeds, normally, a criticism, or a disparaging comment. Otherwise, there would be no need for the preemptory. I ask you, has anyone ask you for your credentials? Has anyone qualified your writing here relative to its serious value? Have you submitted your credentials? If not, what right do you have to his credentials? Where is his burden to proof himself? I wrote that in an attempt to preempt the same comment from you to me since I wrote more than he. I was afraid you might also call me to task. I see with your, "Bug off!", that I was unsucessful. This is a casual, open forum where sailors talk. It is not an examination room.
 
#13 ·
buying a 60'''' steel

Dancy8888,

I have owned a 35'' steel sailboat and am now helping a friend totally rebuild a 39'' steel sailboat.

As for my background I was a marine engineer and worked on a number of metal and fiberglass sail and power boats throughout the Caribbean and all over the East coast. My comments are based on my first hand experience as an engineer, a steel boat owner, and my recent experience with my friend''s corten steel boat.

He had the entire hull sandblasted inside and out (last month) and some parts didn''t get epoxied for 2 weeks, and the metal had virtually no rust!!!! Corten is amazing stuff!

One problem with my boat was that it had exterior wood all over the place. It had a teak cap rail bolted to a raised bulwark. It was a nightmare because of the moisture that infiltrating the space between the wood and the steel it sat on. I''m sure the original owner laid down lots of good paint on the steel, and probably a good thick coat of 5200 on the underside of the wood, but eventually the moisture gets in. Exterior wood on a steel boat is a huge mistake if it''s bolted down!!!

The other problem was that there were larger sections of the interior bilge that were impossible to access, without tearing out the ''permanent'' flooring. There was rust in one area under the head that I could just barely reach, but could feel it with my fingertips. And I have long arms - I'm 6'7". A shorter person might not have known it was there. Rather than tear up beautiful old woodwork, I covered the metal best I could with coal tar epoxy, after getting as much of the rust out as I could.

On my friends boat all the wood handrails have been replaced with curved stainless piping welded to the hull. Same with the stantion bases - welded to the hull. No holes to leak. The sum of all the exterior wood will be the seats and flooring in the cockpit. The sum of the holes in the hull are the minimum necessary. I''m even looking into the possibility of replacing the 2 pipes used for draining the cockpit with bigger pipe and using one as the main intake and the other as the main discharge. Both pipes are on either side of the keel so there shouldn't be a problem of the discharge water getting into the intake pipe as long as the bow is kept into a current flow. At a dock this might not work. The big problem I see with this is keeping discharge fumes out of the cockpit, and dirt from the cockpit fouling the intake screen. The fewer holes, the better.

Wiring is another very important consideration. We'll use an isolation transformer for the shore power and ground everything via one connection at the engine.

The interior floor will be easily removable for inspecting the whole bilge area. We even plan to make the furniture in sections and easy to unbolt from the stringers for complete access to any area of the hull that might need attention. As on my boat there are absolutely no limber holes to be found. The time to build them in is when you are making the stringers, not after the hull has been built. Drilling them now would be a huge project. The other option is to make the boat as water tight as possible, which is what we are doing with this boat.

The guy who built my boat did a wonderful job, but he made it a maintenance nightmare.

Steel boats will last a long time - they just have to be built, wired and maintained the right way so that they don't become sailing 'fizzies'.
 
#16 ·
buying a 60'''' steel

Wow, Dancy8888, you are so full of sh#t.
Here is one of your postings answering someones question about when leave the west coast..

"If you could use the traditional weather plotting charts it would be simple;however,another El Nino is rearing its head out in the Pacific and the weather is not what its supposed to be!We are starting down the slippery slope of CHANGE
make no plans take it as it comes be prepared
for ANYTHING!!!!! "

DO YOU HAVE A PHD IN METEOROLOGY, OR DID YOU READ THAT SOMEWHERE? I''M SURE THE POSTER IS ETERNALLY GREATFUL FOR YOU KEEN SENSE FOR THE OBVIOUS.
 
#20 ·
buying a 60'''' steel

thomas:do your own search!~Look at the websites dealing with weather and ocean currents.Read what learned men are saying.I was actually at sea last El Nino I saw how screwed up the weather predictions were as opposed to the on site actuals!
Weather is something you study your whole cruising life.The sum total of your own knowledge and EXPERIENCE is what you use to evulate your on site weather!!HELL!! when we were 1500 miles offshore fishing Albacore the weather reports were useless we saw the weather before the predictors!!!
 
#21 ·
buying a 60'''' steel

Well, I have to say that Bobola has it on the mark! I am not sure why some of you would say a steel boat is a "fizzing" death sentence...I am in the process of restoring a 40 foot steel boat and I plan on sailing it around the world. I would have nothing else but a steel boat! I know there are a great deal of floating "Chlorox Bottles" out there doing the job, but I want my boat to be able to withstand the rigors of big seas and a fair amount of flotsam out there as well. Can you imagine being holed out in the middle of the pacific? I would rather spend my time making sure that my steel boat is finished correctly. I have been taking care of the rust I have found (most of it surface). What areas that are of concern, I have removed and welded in new plates. Since the welded plate is every bit as strong as the original plate, I find this comforting. As for the electrolytic action that can take place, well there are so many options to take care of that problem. A lot of steel boats out there that are not fizzing into non-existence. I am using Ameron''s Bar-Rust 235 as the primer and then will follow with a two-part polyurethane as the finishing coats. Yes, there are maintenance concerns with steel boats, but hell, what boat doesn''t?

Respectfully to all,
Capt. Chris
 
#25 ·
Interesting comments, though (and I don't mean the steel boat stuff).

Here we are 7 years later, in the middle of their time window. The ozone hole hasn't killed us, the ocean conveyor is working just fine, and, except for normal updates, our charts are still good. Hmm...hmm
 
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