First of all, with all due respect, the nature of your description of what you are proposing to build shows that you really do not have enough sailing experience and
small boat experience to make rewasonable decisions. Specifically, a 65 footer is a huge boat for an inexperienced sailor to handle in the wide range of conditions that one could be expected to encounter out on the
water or in
docking.
Ferrocement appears to be a magical material but in the big picture, the cost of building the
mold, and finishing the hull so that it is it is fair, the difficulty making hull to
deck and bulkhead to hull connections will more than offset the material savings from the
portland cement and reinforcing
steel.
Your use of the term 'concrete worker' suggests that you really do not understand the process of laying up a ferrocement hull.
Layup takes highly skilled stucco mechanics (although some skilled swimming pool crews are also able to provide reasonable quality.) The less skilled the stucco workers. Anything less results in a boat of dubious strength and finish. The
project that I was involved with was a comparatively
small boat but it required a crew of 4 continuously round the clock(from one third aft of the stem to the stern) for not quite two days. Each crew could
work for roughly 2 to 4 hours continuously which meant a crew of over 20 people. A 65 footer is so large that you are talking about a crew ofe perhaps twice that amount.
The hull and
deck of a boat is roughly 25 to 30 percent of the cost of the overall boat. Whatever small savings in the hull costs that can be achieved by using ferrocement, will be more than offset by the greater expense of trying to attach
hardware to ferrocement and the issues of resale.
I would also suggest that you consider a better quality
designer than
Bruce Roberts. Roberts is good at self-promotion but his designs tend to be quite mediocre and dated, of dubious engineering.
I apologize that this next section is cloned from a previous reply to a question about ferro-cement:
"My take on ferro-cement is that it is in fact pound for pound the weakest of all of the commonly
used boat building materials. Ferro-cement operates by the same principle as
fiberglass, in other words, a high tensile strength reinforcing held by a high compressive strength, low tensile strength cement. The cement in ferro-cement ideally is a high strength
Portland cement. The cement in
fiberglass is polyester, vinylester or
epoxy resin. The tensile reinforcing material in ferro-cement is
steel (sometimes with glass fiber, and in fiberglass its glass in a variety of forms, kevlar, carbon and all kinds of new variations on these materials.
Ferro-cement's weight comes from a number of sources. First of all, no matter how small the boat, there is a practical limit to how thin ferro-cement can be. ferro-cement needs to have a minimum thickness in order to have sufficient
depth of material to protect the reinforcement from moisture. Because of this boats below 40 to 45 feet are generally considered too small to use ferro-cement efficiently. (i.e. they weigh more than they would in some other material.) Even in the case of much larger boats, Ferrocement tends to be the heaviest of building materials for a given strength.
The implication of the weight issue is not readily obvious. At the risk of sounding like a broken
record, Weight in and of itself does nothing good for a boat. It does not make it stronger, or more comfortable or more stabile. Weight does increase the stress on the various
parts of a boat. It increases the size of a sail plan required to achieve a particular speed. It increases drag and typically means that for a given
draft a boat will have a less efficient
keel (i.e trading off greater drag for the same amount of leeway.)
In order to carry more sail area the boat needs greater form stability, which comes at the
price or a choppier motion and greater drag, or greater ballast or deeper ballast which adds more weight and drag and perhaps
depth.
To keep the weight down, many ferro-cement cement boats have reduced ballast ratios when compared to other construction techniques. This means that they need more sail area because of their weight but they can't carry more sail area because of reduced ballast ratios without using lower aspect rigs which are by their very nature less efficient.
This is further complicated by the fact a higher proportion of the weight in a ferro-cement boat is carried in the in the topsides (and sometimes decks). This means a high center of gravity which has a variety of implications; reduced stability, wider roll angles, smaller angles of ultimate stability, and more prone to excitation rolling (which may be slightly offset by the greater inertial moments due to weight).
Then there is
maintenance costs. In a study performed some years back looking at the life costs of various materials, ferro-cement-cement came out as the highest
maintenance cost material (if I remember worst to best was ferro-cement, steel, conventional
wood,
aluminum, fiberglass, cold molded wood) Of course as with any generalized study there will be case by case exceptions and given the comparatively small sampling of non-FRP boats it can be easily skewed by a few bad apples.
Other problems with ferro-cement are the difficulty of connecting things to it, and prevention of
rot in
wood in contact with ferro-cement. The difficulty in bolting to ferro-cement is that ferro-cement hates localized loadings. It’s hard to glue things to ferro-cement. secondary bonds are greatly weaker than primary bonds.
Then there is the market value thing. ferro-cement does have a reputation in the States that does not match the comparatively high regard that it is held in other countries. Some of this is just plain unfair prejudice but some of this comes from real shortcomings in the materials as noted above. A well-built ferro-cement boat can be a good cruising boat. But the image of the crudely finished ‘hippie’ built cement and rust buckets still clouds the perception of ferro-cement for many North Americans.
The other problem with
ferro is telling whether a several year old boat is a good boat. It is very hard to do non- destructive
survey techniques to tell whether the original
work was done well and is in good condition. While sounding will reveal any major separations in the cement to reinforcing bond, it does little to determine the affects of fatigue, poor curing practices or cold joints. With Ferro-cement it is particularly important to maintain the ferro-cement
parts in good condtion. That can be very significant. People who buy boats because they are priced well below the market, often are overly frugal or just plain do not have the
money that it takes to properly maintain a boat. Anotherwise good Ferro-cement boat left to poor maintenance and miss-handling can quickly become a poster child for why North American’s don’t trust Ferro-cement
To me the real cost of owning a boat is the difference between what you paid for the boat, the cost of upgrades and maintenance and the
price that you can get when you sell the boat. The problem with a lot of low value boats is that the sales price is always limited no matter how much you put into the boat. This too works against
ferro cement boats.
I guess my conclusion is if you are strictly looking for a low initial up front cost boat and don't mind putting some sweat equity in, and you can look past the sailing shortcomings, or you actually find one that was well built and well maintained, a ferro-cement boat might work out fine for you. For most of us, they do not. "
In any event, there are far stronger, lighter, lower maintenance, easier to work with, and less expensive ways to build a boat. The choice of hull material dramatically effetcs sailing ability, seaworthiness and performance. The inherrent properties of ferro cement makes it a very poor choice if any of these are a important to you. When you talk about building a 65 footer the costs are enormous no matter what matter material that you elect to use, that frankly I would suggest that start with a material that will produce high quality boat and not just one that is based on
cheap hull materials and a perception of ease of construction that is not borne out by reality when you talk about a one off.
Respectfully
Jeff