Quote:
Originally Posted by Bowdrie
Perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek, but jeepers, you do want to have your cake and eat it too.
"Lightness" is usually the most expensive product you can buy.
Will nobody ever fall or be thrown against any cabinetry? Will nothing ever be dropped on it, or the cabin sole?
How much weight do you envision to save? The weight of 2>3 people and a couple of full ice chests?
A perfect finish? In the end that may prove to be the most expensive goal imaginable.
Many types of foam and foam laminates can make a strong structure, but you pay for it with the work necessary to fasten anything to it and the type of work needed to form corner/angle joints that have any structural rigidity.
Grab bars, hand rails, sea rails, towel bars, even a heavy brass barometer won't hold so well to a couple millimeters of "whatever".
Eliminating the use of any Polyesters/Epoxies will by definition degrade the strength of many of the laminations/glue joints. |
did you read the rest of the thread or did you just stop there? Asking because there’s a lot of information about these topics in the thread.
And it doesn’t sound like you are very familiar with my
boat and what it’s like to travel in it. it doesn’t move around very much. I can leave a 16oz plastic keg cup of
water on a glass smooth coffee table with no fiddles all day long in the worst
weather and nothing happens to it. Precisely because I built it the way you think is wrong is why it behaves like this. if I did a bad job and made it heavy, it would be a piece of junk and it would have all sorts of accelerations that it shouldn’t have. you kind of have it all backwards.
heavy brass barometer? Not on my
boat. That’s a dumpster type item
Wait until you see the results. I’ll have the finish looking perfect. And it won’t weigh anything either.
I already have a
galley built with far less structural integrity than we are even talking about here. Stick frame. Douglas Fir 1x2s. 5mm ply (same stuff Jedi talked about). The shelves are a
single layer of 5 mm plywood. Those shelves are holding hundreds of pounds of
galley stuff. it’s only the carcass because i didn’t do the finish work yet . The faces of some of the areas are
single layer of 5 mm plywood. The countertop is something more. It was a more robust half inch piece of a super light plywood. I forget the
wood type. still going strong nearly 6-8 years after I put it in and it’s been in use every day. no, people did not fly around in the galley and smash into it. That’s not the kind of boat I have.
and then finally
cabin soles? What’s your problem with the
cabin soles? you don’t even know how their construction. I haven’t mentioned that at all.
what you don’t understand about a high-performance
catamaran is that every pound counts. You don’t look every little
project and say how much am I going to save. you have to save every single pound at every juncture you can from the beginning you start building the boat until the end. That’s how you do it. That’s how you come out with a good boat. Otherwise you come out with a piece of junk.
There is no justifying adding weight.
every single pound that you add through stupidity or fear results in worse performance, worse handling, lousy acceleration that can spill your drink or throw people into cabinets, and generally just a bad boat. additionally, the boat is far more structurally sound if you don’t add all of that extra weight. The more weight you add the higher the forces are on everything.
if you add the big heavy brass barometer, you have to add something behind it to support it. Then that adds to the weight of the thing that you just built to support the barometer. Which adds to the force on the
hull which maybe makes you increase the amount of glass on a bulkhead which adds more weight which means you have to reinforce the boat in other areas. It’s called a design spiral and it’s no good.
It’s absolutely essential to save every pound you possibly can when you build a good boat.
PS: towel racks go into the bulkheads. not into cabinetry.
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