Australian Recreational Craft Scantling Standard?

Please refer to ISO 12215-6, Annex C, Chapter C.4.1. In the second paragraph it is stated that "butt welds can be carried out only on the one hand, provided that ...."

 

yer you need a backing bar. not practical on shell plating and butt welds are not fillet welds, different type of weld.

 

lloyds is very clear, iso 12215 more ambiguous

 

Hi Tansl
here is the NSCV requirements which is what drives the DC welding requirement over here Not ISO as i suggested. Apologies for misleading you.

 

Of course you need a backing plate or a ceramic backing. Otherwise complete welding can not be achieved throughout the thickness. It is the only way to be able to weld only on one side. If you do not use any of these procedures you have no choice but to weld on both sides. What you can not do is to do something similar to the attached figure because that would be a true and immediate source of fissures.
That is totally forbidden, on commercial ships and on pleasure boats.



We are talking about butt welding of plates, not welding in "T"

 

They talk about full penetration welds, they do not say "welding on both sides".

 

Who forbids it on pleasure boats in countries which do not have legal requirements governing pleasure boat construction?

 

You are right, DCockey, nobody forbids anything when no one is obliged to comply with any rules, I have expressed wrong. I am always in the habit of working with regulations and trying to follow the rules of good practice. I am sorry to have expressed so strongly, I hope you know how to excuse my lack of rigor.
Once I recognize my enormous error, I have to declare that I doubt very much that nobody, although not prohibited, can accept that type of welds without full penetration. That, it seems to me, is what is being discussed here. Would you do something wrong because there are no legal requirements that force you to do it right? Sad philosophy for life, is not it?

 

Could this perhaps answer your oroiginal questions about australian regulations...
https://www.amsa.gov.au/forms-and-publications/domestic/publications/documents/NSCVF2-March2017.pdf
You can see the larger scope here:
National Standard for Commercial Vessels - Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) https://www.amsa.gov.au/domestic/standards/national-standards/
It says:
1.1 Scope This Section provides safety standards for the design, construction, equipping and operation of a domestic commercial vessel that is a leisure craft.
1.2 Application This Section applies to a leisure craft that is: (a) ≤24 m long; and (b) certified to carry ≤12 persons.

Thats about the same as the scope for EU-recreational craft directive. It also references ABYC and ISO dokuments.

I am not a native english speaker, but isn't the meaning of the word "leisure boat" just about the same as "recreational craft" thats the basis of EU directive.
Of course its counter intuitive to classify a "leisure boat" as a special class /category of commersial vessels.
I do not intend to act as a specialist of Australian Law, but i think this issue has to do with different legal traditions and the situation where legislators are in relation the to issue at hand.

This will hopefully help explain what I mean.

EU organs do not have jurisdiction over national legislation in member states, but it can regulate rules about engagement in common markets.
So gives out simple "recreational craft directive". It basically says that every boat you sell in EU has to be safe, and the responsible party is the one who introduces the boat to the market. The boat must have a CE plate that is simply the manufacturer making the claim: My boat is safe. Simple. You can freely sell boats with these CE-plates in EU, but you may not sell a new boat without it (there are some exceptions). You can make a boat for your private use, but you can sell it to someone els only after 5 years. I guess the reasoning is that if someone has been able to drive around in a boat for 5 years and someone else is stupid enough to buy that boat, it must be at least minimally safe. At least enough for egislators to escape responsibility. Creating a good law is much harder that you migth think. If its too loose, you have unsafe products around. If its too strict, you hinder innnovation and personal freedoms. And here migth perhaps be the reason for having legislation about "Commersial boats" for "leisure purposes". Perhaps there will be some market regulation coming in at some stage. Perhaps the legislators simply do not want to demand things by law.

Here in EU. The Directive is simple, and the national laws basically just state the same. The problem arises when you try to define whats "enough safety", and thats why the law references these ISO -standards as the final authority about the issue. So if you sell a boat thats bad, there is a basis to decide if you are to blame or not.

 

It's interesting that in these regulations "leisure craft" are a sub-type of "commercial vessels". Perhaps these regulations only apply to vessels used for leisure purposes in a commercial setting such as boats which are rented or chartered.

 

You need to clarify whether you are referring to fillet welds or butts welds and also their location.

 

In any event, in small aluminium boats, construction based on plate shells and frames, is very different to construction based on swaged thinner gauge material, and using extrusions for frames and where sheets join, at the chine, gunwale etc. The latter imo is a far better use of the lightweight attributes of aluminium.

 

I'm pretty sure these little aluminium boats were not welded or riveted, but held together by the sheeting cleverly slotted into extrusions, and sealed/bonded by some kind of polyurethane. Been around for a long time, so must have worked. "Express" Boats, I think was the name.

 

In my opinion, but I do not want anybody to feel annoyed by my words, no regulation considers "leisure craft" as a sub-type of "commercial vessels." They are simply vessels working under different conditions than commercial ones, subject to solicitations different and, therefore, with different design pressures.
In ISO 12215-5 it is said that the scope of application of the norm is the one of small boats, monohull, of length LH between 2,5 and 24 meters. It does not say that it only applies to leisure crafts.

 

I dont plan to argue, but this seems to do it...

Its from the title page of above...
"National Standard for Commercial Vessels
Part F Special vessels
Section 2 Leisure craft"​

I have no clue as to why Australians put leisure boats under this category, but clearly its categorised under commercial Vessels as a special version...
Whats the difference in concepts?

Australia is pretty much exactly on the other side ot the world for me, so its not really local stuff. I dont know much about Australia, but I know some things about stuff in Finland.

Well the ISO 12215-5 was developed because of the Recreational Crafts Directive as an European wide co-operation on the basis of the Nordic NBS -standard and ABYC. There were also some American experts in the working group. I do not know what other parties were represented in the process. I guess the idea was to simplify globalisation in the boating industry. For Europe the problem was that even though there were standards available for boatbuilding in several countries, they were very heterogenous, and therefore there was no basis for Common markets in EU. The Nordic countries had the NBS standard. It was pretty much based on DNV rules, but for example southern european and eastern european countries had very different approaches. The ISO 12215 (and many others) are like the agreed minimum.

​

You can register a boat as a recreational craft or as a workboat, in Finland. Whats the difference a commercial vessel and a workboat? I dont know. Sound pretty similar to me. But they are just words. Workboats are used by professionals in professional capacity. Could the consept of commersial vessel be similar, or are they just providing the info for all? After its usefull life as a workboat you cannot sell a workboat as a recreational craft automatically unless its designed and approved as such also. Ofcourse the intended use is different, so it creates some differences, like demands from hard use, but most of the stuff is pretty much the same.

Here is the Finnish workboat rules. http://www.vttexpertservices.com/Documents/Guidelines for Commercial Craft version 2016.2.pdf

But there is another aspect to this. Legislators cannot duplicate the work of ISO in legislation. They are not free to publish copyrighted material of ISO, even though its based on the work paid by taxmoney. But they can make a National code for workboats, and provide enough information with the legislation, for free. This text is from the above Commersial Craft guidelines:

1.3 Principles when using ISO-standards The ISO-standards referred to are mainly developed for CE-certification of boats according to the directive 2013/53/EU (the Recreational Craft Directive). The scope of these standards is for "small craft" up to 24 m hull length and as such not restricted to recreational craft only. The principles used in these standards are often relevant to commercial craft as well, even though the required level for them in the standards in some instances is too low. The ISO standards are implemented as follows:
- The Rules text is to a large extent based on ISO-standards. Often the requirement level is, however, higher than in the corresponding ISO-standards. At the beginning of each chapter, in the section References, the applicable ISO-standards for the chapter are listed.
- These Rules deal with the most common cases, for special cases reference is made to ISO-standards.
- The Rules text primarily refers for Commercial Craft. In the Rule chapters where reference is made to ISO-standards, additionally the applicable parts of the standards refer. In view of this the Rule user should also have access to the standards referred to.
- It is the intention that these Rules will be updated regularly in line with the latest version of the referenced ISO-standards. ​

Copyright applies only to the text of the standard, not the content matter. Knowledge is free, the publication is not. Before EU, we used to have lots of instructional stuff that came along the actual law. Each ministry prepared some istructional material with the actual documents of law that explained with more detail what the actual text of the written law meant (where needed, like in construction and boatbuilding), to ensure proper understanding. Nordic standards for boatindustry were publicly available, for free. Nowadays much of that stuff is left out, and buried in general references to standards, like ISO 12215. I think its a side-effect of the EU and big businesses protecting their interests. The problem with this minimalistic style of writing the law is that "a part of the law", namely the exact meaning of the applicable concepts, is buried away in these standards. This practice means that an essential part of the legislation is behind a "paywall", like secret legislation thats not publicly available. Its a problem for democracy, openness, equality etc... If the international standards were available as a public service, there would not be a problem. Its easier to fix technical stuff if its not in the law, although its more vulnerable to lobbyits. Standards organisations are non-state actors. The earlier NBS-Y standard was freely available. With the ISO standard this work was at first abandoned. This is probably one of the motivations that the Finnish Maritime Administration (currently TraFi) developed the Work Boat Guidelines based on the NBS and new ISO standards that had been developed primarily for the needs of the Recreational Craft Directive. Is publicly available for free. The professional use of these boats means that the rules are more strick in some places than the 69 or so standards that define the RCD recuirements, but it incorporates the ISO standards even though it does not reproduce the standards. You can count how expensive it is to get the info if each standard costs 100-200€. Standards are not only about technical issues, its also about politics, economy, national interests, busines practices etc...

Btw i have had some discussions about this matter with the our country representative in the working group. I was informed that they made demands for the public availability of the standards, but were voted out. I have no way of knowing if the Australians are perhaps trying to do the same.