80 foot cargo harryproa

Discussion in 'Multihulls' started by lucdekeyser, Nov 15, 2020.

  1. Alik
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    Alik Senior Member

    Add to this mentality of 'third-world' population, and one will understand why such innovations will never work. It will be stolen before it gets broken. Or will be broken before put in service ;)
     
  2. gonzo
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    gonzo Senior Member

    That is the usual problem; lack of expertise, materials and proper places to work in. Carbon fiber can't be repaired properly under a tree.
     
  3. lucdekeyser
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    lucdekeyser Senior Member

    This may refer rather to the mini cargo which was finished and sailed. And success is in the eye of the beholder, depends on the frame of reference and is only as credible as the jury is.
     
  4. lucdekeyser
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    lucdekeyser Senior Member

    I can only point to technology that does make it these populations nevertheless like smart phones, outboards, photovoltaic cells, extruded plastic outriggers, ...
     
  5. lucdekeyser
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    lucdekeyser Senior Member

    Let me relaunch the interest in the building techniques conveniently exposed in this weekly blog describing failures and all.
    One topic would be building a hull with a couple of blokes in a large garage within a number of weeks and on the cheap.
    [​IMG]
     
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  6. Alik
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    Alik Senior Member

    What is the hull core material? Is it a honecomb?
     
  7. Gringles
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    Gringles Junior Member

    "The success of the cargo ferry concept has lead to several spin offs" - Orbiter promotional blog post.

    Your answer made my point for me, which happens to be a nicer way of saying "a fool and his money are soon parted."
     
  8. lucdekeyser
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    lucdekeyser Senior Member

    OK, a more accurate read could have been "The success of the cargo ferry concept has lead to several conceptual spin offs (use cases) as illustrated further down the page"

    It is commendable to be protective of naive aspirant boat owners but please note that there is no price list nor order form anywhere for anything but building plans and thus no chance for a fool to part from a sizeable chunk of money.

    The build is exactly the point: to shift from pretty pictures on the internet (for that 80' model as smaller models have been built already) to a realistic prototype, open for everyone to watch and learn and judge while it is being built. No more ambition that that.
     
  9. lucdekeyser
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    lucdekeyser Senior Member

    I believe the intent is to replace full core foam plates with foam trusses where the strength is necessary as in the following picture.
    [​IMG]
     
  10. gonzo
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    gonzo Senior Member

    What you are seeing are panel stiffeners, not a truss.
     
  11. Gringles
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    Gringles Junior Member

    I've never seen panel stiffeners arranged in that manner on a boat before. Interesting from a scantling perspective.
     
  12. rob denney
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    rob denney Senior Member

    Thanks Luc.
    My comments follow the italicised ones from the thread. Please keep them coming. I do not claim to have all the answers, and appreciate all boat related suggestions. Snide personal comments are ignored.

    It looks wonderful - but will it be viable financially?
    Glad you like it. The prototype looks a bit different, but the idea is the same. It probably won't be financially viable, but then neither are many of the current shipping services to remote villages. It is meant to be reliable (currently, a ship every 3 months is not unusual, nor is it breaking down and not arriving at all), regular, locally crewed (and maybe built), and not use diesel. The current ships expensive and polluting, and the island nations are trying to set a good example to the rest of the world as they will be the first places submerged if/when sea levels rise.

    They mention that the payload is 10 tonnes of cargo, and 25 passengers - realistically, how much can they expect to earn on a typical voyage when carrying this amount of cargo and passengers?
    Not a lot. Copra one way, groceries and building materials the other is normal. Maybe fish and veges with the copra if the service is regular and fast enough. But making money is not the raison d'etre. Without reliable transport, the villagers move to the city, with adverse effects on infrastructure and welfare in the city, and more importantly, no one to look after the islands and their environment. This is a big deal in the Islands and why the current ships and their fuel are heavily subsidised.

    And what would the typical cost of overheads be (re maintenance, crew wages, depreciation etc?
    These were high on the SOI.
    The boat is all fibreglass, no structural core to delaminate, fastenings to leak, timber to rot, metal to corrode or holes below the waterline. Occasional painting with house paint is all that is required. The unstayed masts should last forever with an occasional coat of paint. The sails and ropes will not last long. We are looking at alternatives, any suggestions appreciated.
    The bottoms are coated with copper in epoxy. Not much good as an antifouling in crowded marinas, but not so bad in the open ocean. More importantly, it is hard enough to withstand serious scraping and lasts 1o years or so.
    The proposed rudders, which are large enough to prevent leeeway are as simple as we could make them, have almost nothing to maintain, are liftable for shallow water and kick up in a collision. The boat floats in </300mm/12" of water so is easily scrubbed off.
    2 crew can handle it, including loading and unloading freight using 'mini shipping containers" which we are working on making from recycled vacuum bags and other waste. Most journeys will be under 300 miles, so 1-2 days depending on weather and load. The Islanders have a long and proud seafaring history, and all of them 'know' they are as capable as their ancestors of sailing to far away places. The kudos that will go with being an actual sailor on a boat that looks like a descendant of their traditional craft will be large, based on the excitement the idea has generated so far. It will not be hard, or expensive, to get crew. Training will be required, but there are at least a couple of organisations doing a great job of this.
    Insurance and survey requirements will kill the project so there will be no charges for carrying cargo and no passengers on the prototype. The idea is to show the potential and let it grow up from the grassroots users rather than down from the bureaucracy. If it doesn't work out, I will have a fun few years sailing round the Pacific, meeting the locals and finding out why.

    And perhaps most important, what would be the initial capital cost of building one of these 80' proas?
    So far I have spent just under $AUS20,000/$US14,000 on 3/4 of a ton/tonne of infusion epoxy, similar weight of fibreglass, the mould table and consumables (vac bag, sealant tape, infusion medium). Plus ~a grand on some cheap tools (main one was a $AUS250 vac pump) to augment the ones I have.
    The windward hull panels are built and it is partly assembled, the 8.4m/27' tender is built, the rudders are ready to be joined and there is enough material for the beams, bridgedeck and some of the lee hull. I am about to place another order of about the same value which should get all these finished and the masts built. Plus sails, rigging, motor, safety gear, etc etc etc.
    I have been fortunate enough to get a free shed and overheads from the University of Queensland, some volunteer student labour and a lot of help from a local Harryproa enthusiast. No idea what this is all worth, but the plan is to develop a boat that a village can build, under supervision, so it would not apply to them, either.

    Has a study been carried out to determine how long it would take to pay back the cost of a vessel?
    Hundreds of them! This is part of why I am building it. There is a huge industry of people flying to conferences (to discuss reducing CO2 emissions), writing papers (often wishful thinking), paying for expensive design studies for pipe dream solutions and talking about what should be done. But few are doing anything. One exception is GiZ, a German organisation that paid me to spend 10 weeks in the Marshall Islands showing the locals how to build a smaller version for inside the atoll use. Huge fun, great people and the boat has been gps clocked at 13 knots with 5 Marshallese and their fishing gear on board. More are planned. Mini Cargo Ferry Prototype – HARRYPROA http://harryproa.com/?p=3155 After spending 3 years trying to impress the bureaucrats with pretty pictures and presentations, I decided to skip all that and show a live version to the people who will benefit.

    The amount of solar panels indicate it is not low tech.
    The panels have been offered as part of another University project to supply power to cyclone damaged villages. They will also drive an electric motor on the tender, which is the auxillary for the mothership (see CRUISER 60 – HARRYPROA http://harryproa.com/?p=1747. scroll down to Tender and T60 – HARRYPROA http://harryproa.com/?p=1763.) The boat is primarily a sail boat so it will only be used when there is no wind and in difficult harbours. The electric motor is one of the areas where we have yet to come up with a situation appropriate solution. Maybe a sealed unit with plug and play controls?

    Cargo sailing ships have already been developed and refined. This may appeal to green minded passengers willing to pay a high price for a ticket though.

    Cargo sailing ships are poorly developed as they usually start with the need for huge payloads. Consequently they do not sail well, need big auxiliaries and the design spiral goes down to a heavy, expensive boat which only sails down/cross wind, and then only if the crew can be bothered setting the sails.
    The green tourist market is large, but not who we are targeting. However, 2 resorts (Solomons and Philipines) have asked to be included in the demonstration tour.

    The 80' vessel with 25 passengers likely tobe covered by SOLAS (especially if it is making international voyages). Did the designers go through SOLAS and checked it?
    If the prototype is designed, built and certified it will be expensive. Part, but not all of this is because there is no category which deals with proas with unstayed masts and no inboard engine; afaik, correct me if I am wrong. Apart from the big diesel ships, the other form of interisland travel is the ubiquitous banana boat/panga/fibreglass skiff. 6-9m/20-30' long with a 40 hp outboard. Put a 200 litre drum of petrol on board, a dozen or so passengers and head off across the horizon. The loss rate from these is apparently high as there are usually no safety rules or implementation.
    The Govts are aware of this, but at present, there is not a lot they can do. Close down the pangas and there is no transport at all. We hope the cargo proa will demonstrate that there is an alternative and the rules will be either rewritten to suit the cargo proa and/or the panga rules enforced. This is not expected to happen overnight, or even soon.

    In Third World countries labor is cheap and available. Using local materials and primitive techniques is the most economic design. Forget about trusses and carbon fiber.
    This is fine in places where the trees have not all been chopped down, the knowledge exists and only small boats that don't go upwind are required. Even then, the boats tend to rot away within a few years. This is why I was invited to design and build the mini cargo proa. The Marshallese I built it with are excellent (better than me) builders and keen to try new technology. They will have no problems with the truss building techniques we are developing, nor with using carbon. I fully expect them to improve on both.

    Add to this mentality of 'third-world' population, and one will understand why such innovations will never work. It will be stolen before it gets broken. Or will be broken before put in service
    Locally built and owned boats are well maintained. The problem is well meaning first worlders giving the Islanders unsuitable designs built from inappropriate materials without showing them how to maintain them, or that they cannot afford to repair. These are the boats that fall apart.

    That is the usual problem; lack of expertise, materials and proper places to work in.
    Correct. That is why we are simplifying the design and build, using easily sourced, worked and repaired materials, and offering supervision of the first build, which will include how to maintain them.

    Carbon fiber can't be repaired properly under a tree.
    A high spec carbon product needs a high spec repair, but a low spec carbon one, perhaps 90% of the performance/110% of the weight of the high spec one is easily repaired, the same as fibreglass. Not only under a tree, but sitting on a couple of car tyres between tides if necessary.
    The carbon components are the masts and rudders. They are built from pultruded carbon strips, which are cheaper, higher quality and easier to build from than if we infused them.
    Breaking or damaging the masts would require a rare set of conditions. Hitting things with the rudders will be much more common. Hence they kick up and are easily removed for repair or replacement. They have sacrificial, impact absorbing, non structural, segmented and easily replaced leading and trailing edges to facilitate quick and simple repairs.

    What you are seeing are panel stiffeners, not a truss.
    We have tried and are continuing to try different methods of panel stiffening: including it in the infusion, adding it afterwards, non structural foam, hollow, solid glass T's,L's and other shapes. Some work well, some don't. It is a much more challenging and enjoyable approach than simply specifying prone to delamination, high cost foam everywhere. It is also simple and cheap to add more stiffening as required.
    The attached pics show 2 of the 1/5th scale trusses we have tested at 500 kgs load. The first is the lee hull truss between the beams with 16mm dia glass primary members, 12mm glass diagonals. The second is a beam. Also 500 kgs load, all members 12mm dia glass.
    More build progress reports at Cargo Ferry Prototype – HARRYPROA http://harryproa.com/?p=3788 and Harryproa https://www.facebook.com/Harryproa/?ref=page_internal These pages are updated weekly(ish). An overall view is at http://harryproa.com/?p=2561

    I welcome any design help/ideas/suggestions to make this boat a success.

    scientific load test.JPG Beam test 274 kgs.jpg
     
  13. dsigned
    Joined: Aug 2017
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    dsigned O.R.C. Hunter


    To hopefully piggyback on Rob's already pretty thorough response:

    The issue is that there is almost no commercial shipping to the islands, and traditional boats don't last very long, require the locals to chop down trees that are now often endangered to build them, and are pretty size limited. And while diesel is fairly plentiful on the mainland, when is has to be shipped several thousand miles and stored on the island, and is something everyone is trying to move away from anyway, it makes sense to examine sailing solutions. Proas are very fast and stable, especially over long distances, have shallow drafts, and are familiar to the locals.

    As a historical aside: Proas were invented after trimarans and catamarans and radiated out, replacing both in areas where the design made it to. The concept stopped radiating with the arrival of European colonizers, and essentially halted development on the type until fairly recently (basically the 20th century, but really more like the 21st century in terms of the level of interest). In my (unprofessional) opinion, shunting is a disadvantage on the short course match races. But when the time spent tacking/shunting/etc. is small compared to the time spent on a given tack, the advantages of proas eclipse the disadvantage of shunting. There's no "extra" weight on a proa. Everything is basically righting moment, waterline or sail. On a catamaran half of your righting moment is always on the wrong side, and in a tri, your righting moment is mostly always in the middle.

    As for the "let's try" approach: that's the nature of innovation, isn't it? Things that are obvious and assured have pretty much all been done. Things that haven't been done have quite a bit of risk. While I'm not entirely sure about the details of the design (which I hear is where the devil is), there's no conceptual problem with scaling a proa to 80+ feet. There have been several 60+ foot proas. And there are quite a few ventures looking into sailing to various places in the pacific that are inconvenient to reach by conventional means.
     
  14. Rumars
    Joined: Mar 2013
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    Rumars Senior Member

    Why use epoxy for this build? Osmosis can not be a concern with the hulls infused, 2/3's of the structure out of the water and an already planned epoxy barrier coat underwater. Even the cheapest epoxy must be 3 times the price of polyester, plus it requires regular painting. Just use cheap poly and gelcoat the thing.

    Why the complex truss? A box section is simpler, does not use more materials, and you already proved you can build box sections.
     

  15. Alik
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    Alik Senior Member

    Of course, there is a space for innovation. Once it is built and is in successful commercial operation (and certified to do that), then probably we can return to discuss it.
    Right now there are a lot of big claims, but little proofs - excerpt some flat water sailing videos and lengthy posts in Internet...
     
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