Sheered waterline.

Tad, Thanks again - you have raised my personal bar! If I may, as it doesn't warrant a thread, what is your take on subdued colored masts or black as opposed to the pictured white? (Beautiful boat, BTW. Is it one of yours?) "screwed up more often than not" - People have a hard time conceptualizing how to handle where the chine intercepts the boottop, too.

Edit: I see Michael posted a pic of wood, or woodtone masts! That workboat's is not pleasing to my eye.

 

mark,

I am a total traditionalist and always favor spruce (buff) or mahogany if you must coloured spars...my own small boat has varnished sitka spruce and the big boat will have tarred fir spars....see the pic below......



The boat in my previous post is the Hinckley Talaria 44, which I had a hand in the design of......a not so successful model partly because the accommodation requirements pushed the helm aft and really messed up visibility when running......

 

What is a boottop?

 

"People have a hard time conceptualizing how to handle where the chine intercepts the boottop, too."

On Chines , Exhaust thru hulls and irregular surfaces that the boottop crosses, I see the local guys use a short piece of string and a can of spray paint. They tape the end of the string, pull tight along the waterline and against the chine or exhaust, then light blast it ,from perpendicular, with a can of spraypaint. The string leaves a no paint line..shadow. A pretty handy technique for oddball shapes that a paint line must cross. A guess you could also shine a light to form the shadow then pencil in.

 

Well, I wrongly grew up calling it a "bootstrap" and still slip once in awhile. I have tried to call it a boot stripe but generally avoided calling it anything because I was too lazy to look it up and the guys I was working with wouldn't know the nomenclature anyway. I believe "boottop" is short for "boot top stripe" or "boot topping" The stripe above the waterline but it has a different meaning on ships, perhaps the area between loaded and unloaded waterlines...
Michael, nice tip there. I have sometimes been astounded at the creative and wrong way the guy that did mine last year did it (I am always the guy last year).
Tad, gorgeous.

 

Its the interesting thing about travel and observing many different boat builders at work. Few weeks ago I needed to repair the forward "vee" in a rib hull. Been dragged so many times over hard surfaces that the hull would soon split. Biax and epoxy is the perfect repair material. Locally you cant buy a small piece of biax tape so I visited the local composite boat builder who uses biax cloth, described what I needed to do and hes says sure..Ill drop a piece by in the morning. Next morning he shows up with a piece of Biax, clear plastic sheet, a square of plywood and a piece of peel ply. Lays the ply down as a wet out table, covers it with plastic sheet, lays a chunk of biax down on the plastic sheet, impregnates it, covers with peel ply, gentle taps down with a glove covered hand, then with a marker pen drew the repair patch shape onto the peel ply and cut threw the plastic, epoxy biax, peel ply sandwich with scissors. Presto a nice round cornered ,tapered, epoxy Biax Band Aid. Applied this biax band aid to the broken rib vee,, gentle peeled off the plastic under layer, compressed the peel plyed biax patch with a glove covered hand, wiped off the squeezed out epoxy and ...perfect patch. It took less than 5 minutes ! So clean and tidy that I gave it one addition coat of pigmented epoxy the next day and it looks factory made. Plenty of tricks around from guys who build boats for a living and best of all the repair only cost me a couple beers after work. .

 

A Boot top is a painted line just above the water line

 

Basic Boot Top Formula

Back when I worked at Sparkman and Stephens the guide line for boot tops was:

The vertical heights in inches above the lwl based on the following percentages of the lwl expressed in feet:

STATION 0 STATION 7 (LOW POINT) STATION 10 (stern)

TOP OF BOOT 0.245 0.145 0.173
BOTTOM OF BOOT 0.100 0.056 0.73

To all as Tad pointed out the Formula as I had first stated didn't look quite correct. These new numbers are from the orgional memo. Although this was intended for sailboat and motor sailers it is a good starting point for powerboats.

 

Very interesting and useful discussion, particularly the contributions from Tad and Paul. This isn't a topic I've seen discussed before. Thanks.

 

Station 7 and Station 10 ? What type of hull form ?

 

Very similar to my numbers Bruce, though the three points leave a lot of "latitude" to the guy springing the batten.

 

Thanks for the guide numbers Bruce......trying it out results in (For me) a line that's too skinny and flat, especially aft, on a sailing yacht with good sheer.....

I suspect that the guide results in this......



I think one could easily imagine a higher and wider boottop would help this boat look sleek and sexy instead of fat.....the S&S Swan/PJ 43

 

And here's the results of someone (I believe Bob Harris) ignoring the guide lines and doing it just right....the S&S Swan 65

 

Here's a nice wide boottop on a sailing vessel.......it helps her high freeboard disappear in long graceful horizontal curves......by William Garden

 

And here's Garden again with a nice wide boottop on a powerboat, the Vega 36