Double ender opinions

[jakegator]

Hello everyone, im fairly new to sailing, but not building sail boats haha. If any one could help me out with my question it would be greatly appreciated! So i have been looking at building a liveaboard sail boat, one design that caught my eye. It is a Hartley Norsk 40. I really like that it has a good beam for this size. It is a double ender. I wanted to know about the performance of double enders compare to other designs as well as their stability.

Thank you for your help,
-Jake

[RichH]

Not much difference in the sailing characteristics between most 'double enders' and 'normal' boats. Consider that most of the 'sharp protuberance' you see on 'double enders' are 'style' and not function, then your 'comparison' is more valid.

Advantages with a double ender
.... you cant stow a lot of unneeded useless CRAP in the lazarette.
.... most are 'symmetric hull forms' which means you can heel them over to almost their beam ends and not have much change in 'helm pressure'.
.... if you decide to sail 'backwards' for long distances, you can part-the-waves like Moses did
.... "looks good" and make the boat 'look longer', stylistically.

[tdw]

Please refer to Colin Archer and Redningsselskapet.

The Hartley is a copy of Archer's most famous design, ferro cement, gaff rigg, full keel, usually home built. Thats not a great start. It is quite possible to build a good boat in ferro but they are as rare as hen's teeth. They are cheap to buy, largely uninsurable and as a result have bugger all resale value. Even really good ones, and they do exist, have ordinary resale value, worse even than steel.

However I guess you didn't ask for opinions on ferro as such so I'll stfu on that subect.

As for double enders ... refer K Aage Nielson, Bob Perry, Bill Crealock. When you consider the output from those guys then it is simply not possible to slam double enders per se. Reality is there are gooduns and baduns. Those three tended towards the goodun side of the equation and I for one would be quite content to go to sea in one of their double ended creations. Beautiful is a word that also comes to mind.



Of course around about now I'd be expected to get stuck into gaff rigs except that the Perry fellow just happens to have designed a couple that seem to work quite well, hell one of them is a schooner that from all appearances honks along quite nicely though he resisted the temptation to build her out of concrete.

[jakegator]

Thank you everyone for you input! As far as the building material, im going to build it with the cold molded plywood method, as ferrocement does not seem to be very good for the resources I have.
Once again thank you for your help!

-Jake