08-06-2007
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Junior Member
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Join Date: Jun 2007
Posts: 15
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Newport41
Boats are now days a commercial product. They're designed to sell to the largest market and I think the design changes over time go hand in hand with construction methods. Now days the market is going for space, comfort, and to a lesser extent, speed. The seaworthy designs of the past are out of style and the wide, light and complicated are in. There's pluses and minus' to this. Cruising appeals to more people now but finding what some would call a "real,seaworthy" boat is getting difficult. I think the real loss in the high-tech construction and design is the fact that there's so redundancy. There's no room for error. Take the Mumm 36 or any other high tech racing sled. Aspects of them are stronger than anything we've seen. But if something happens that wasn't planned on or calculated in the design phase, then they're so fragile.
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I could not agree more. There is no room for errors when sailors lives are on the line. The failure patterns in epoxy vs polyester are very different indeed. As the life-cycle of a boat goes from being a polyester hull with AL stick to an epoxy hull with epoxy stick all of a sudden the designer could place the centerline of the hull below the waterline as the weakest part of the system. Think I am exaggerating? Read on...If you look at the materials and the way the shop floor has to handle them during the layup you will see that the market and certain designers are about to or may have already set themselves up for a major fall.
Just last year a 2005 Tartan 3700 hull split clean open 30 inches under the forward bulkhead some distance from the mast step. The incident involved a delivery from NJ to MD. The hull split allowing water in up to 3' above the cabin sole. The USCG came to the rescue and thankfully no lives where lost at sea. The boat was then whisked away from a yard in the NE and repaired.
The owner was quickly blamed for over tensioning the rig. No notice was ever supplied, or has been supplied to owners on rig tension, or hull inspection procedures. It is a shocking way for a manufacturer to allegedly conceal relevant safety data from the market.
Do a Google search for 'split hull Tartan 3700' and see what you come up with
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