Fixing up an old production boat into a solid cruiser

[souljour2000]

I thought this link might be interesting to those out there like myself who are trying to" beef up" and pretty up a good ol' production boat instead of buying new or what have you.

I suppose it demonstrates some of the possibilites at least of what one can do to an old production boat to make a solid coastal or bluewater boat.If anyone cares to comment on his narrative or not I will say it raised a few questions in my mind with regard to a few of his alterations/improvements and whether I'd consider doing them to my own old production boat. Any thoughts?


http://www2.trailersailor.com/index....wad&adid=11149

[cb32863]

Link does not work. URL not found.

[souljour2000]

Hmm..k...well..let's try this again..

.The Trailer Sailor

[PorFin]

If the owner is to be believed (and there's no reason not to that I can see), he's got 50K invested in materials alone. For a 24' boat he's willing to sell for 23K.

This would be a good example of spending a LOT of money to make a boat suitable for something it wasn't designed for. Yes it can be done, but you'd have been better off in terms money, time, and let's face it, confidence if you had just bought a PSC Dana 24 in the first place.

[souljour2000]

Can't argue with that...50 grand is alot of dough...not to mentiuon the thousands of hours this person put into projects on her. I can think of alot worse ways to spend my time but maybe not my money so much...It's a nice older boat..
I think alot of us these days can only afford an older boat like this which we can fix up and enjoy but 50 grand is not in the plan for my Seafarer 24...or at least not the return this guy will get...
I guess a new owner of a "good ol' boat" might wish to consider having a budget partially reflecting what you can reasonably expect to sell her for but this type of thinkoing is rarely realistic..she's well..a "she" after all...some better-looking than others..some better performing than others....and emotions get in the way for most of us...

[COOL]

For that much money and effort,
you could easily have a 30-35' boat
all fixed up and ready to go.

[bljones]

The boat has sat on the hard since 1998. I wonder how much of that $50 K worth of work now has to be reworked.

[souljour2000]

True...it's kind of a sad story I think all in all but hope I'm wrong...hope he had a good time fixing her up though...and heck..some people lost more than that in the stock market crash,,,401k's etc.. life is so chock full of these endings to the story...sigh...

[Jeff_H]

And this is a classic example of why one should start with a boat with an inherently good design if one is going to do this kind of thing. The boat in question started out a 24 foot Bristol Corsair (nee Sailstar Corsair), which were okay coastal cruisers for their day and still make halfway decent coastal cruisers if you find one in decent shape and cheap enough. They were never intended to be offshore boats. There are some things that can be done to make them better heavy air boats, but it would still be questionable whether these 'improvements' would be cost effective in that there are some very nice boats with better capabilities available for far less money that it would take to adapt the Bristol.

But in this case we have a person, who clearly admits that he knows nothing about yacht design, working at cross purposes with his stated goals. One of the short comings of the Corsair is that they were a little weight sensitive and this guy has poured litterally tons of stuff onto this small cruiser in the hopes that it might somehow improve it. While he may have accomplished some of his goals (making the boat stronger) he has done so at the price of others of his goals (making the boat into an offshore cruiser)

And as I read his description of his building techniques, I thought here was a guy standing there shooting himself in the foot and then reloading in case his toes moved again. For example this gem, "After adding all of the solid lead, I poured liquid lead into the voids (in the fiberglass keel cavity)until I had added all of the ballast weight I thought was necessary." In other words, this guy was casting lead within the boat herself. While to some extent the lead ingots would act as a heatsink, the fiberglass would still be exposed to high heat for a substantial period of time. While polyester does not do well with high heat (becomes brittle) the epoxy that he added would permanently lose a large percentage of its strength and ductility by being exposed to this level of heat. In other words, for all of his efforts he actually weakened the keel area.

In other words, this article is a perfect example of what not to do.

Jeff