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Subject: RE: [world-cruising] Fiberglass or Steel
From: Doug Barnard (dbarnard@XXX.XXX)
Date: Sun May 11 2003 - 18:58:02 EDT
At one point I was all fired up to build myself an origami steel boat,
one of Brent Swain's designs. The conclusions that I came to were:
1) I wouldn't buy a steel boat unless I personally knew the builder and
the subsequent owners. Corrosion is an insidious thing, and can happen
in the least likely places. Granted, if you are doing the building, you
can coat out the interior with epoxy tar, and will be in great shape.
2) The sprayed-on insulation would need to be 100% painted with acrylic
paint, as a fire-retardant. That foam, when burning, gives off deadly
fumes. If there was just stick-on or batt insulation, I wouldn't get the
boat. Condensation will kill the boat in cold climates.
3) The interior would need to stay spartan. Steel boats just don't have
the value that Fiberglass has. If you fixed up the boat too much, you
couldn't get the value back out.
4) You need to be far more knowledgeable about boats, as most steel
boats are one-off or limited production. Could be that things were done
funky, or to someone's bizarre standards.
Aside from that, building yourself an origami steel boat can supposedly
be done in a fraction of the time, but you need welding skills. I'd
still like to build my own, but life and an overwhelming desire to go
cruising got in the way. Though if you could find a nice factory-built
Van de Staadt sloop for a good price, I've heard nothing but good things
about them.
The main thing is to just get something reasonable and go as soon as
possible. Folks cruise effectively in hulls built from all different
sorts of materials. You wait too long for the "right" boat to come
along, maybe you die of old age!
Doug Barnard
______________________________
Selling the house
Buying a boat
Sailing to Paradise
Figuring things out from there
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