Affordable seaworthy cruiser

The way to go...

Good will, it seems that you have a long way to go. What most other experts do is make a model and test it. In your case, and considering your lack of hands on experience, make her just big enough for a person.
Take her in and test your faith!!! (wear something buoyant just in case)
If you make it back we promise to take you seriously.....

 

Bataan,

Please persevere.

Your comments are most of the value of this thread, might save this person, but is this a laudable goal?

How has building an ark taken 56 pages? Thanks for your comments and examples. Not to slight others with similar comments.

Marc

 

Building a small scaled version first is the way to go to get your feet wet.

 

Steel or aluminum tanks as they are cheap, easily replaceable and a known item.
Aluminum tanks, when properly built, isolated and installed, are the best.
Try to use a stock tank from the West Marine catalog if at all possible, as these are tested and made in a tank shop, have gauge etc.
All BERTIE's fuel tanks are stock rectangular aluminum tanks below decks from this source.
My water tanks are S/S Pepsi syrup 55 gal drums on deck.
On BERTIE the dry stack comes out the house top and has a rube goldberg auto muffler grafted on.
Exhaust exits about 2' above helmsman's head and works well but is loud and sometimes smelly.
It never never screws up at a bad time and there is no pump, through hull or corroded pipe involved.
The pipe doesn't get very hot in the cabin and you can put your hand on the 1/2" thick lagging after running for hours.
SABB recommends running the stack out the side, but it tends to burn the plank where the fitting is and can flood.
If using wet exhaust, use a lift box and follow accepted design practices, which are easily found on-line..........

 

Bataan,

Did think of running the stack straight up as you have but, the reasons you give are why it wont be done that way, as the engine will be the main source of propulsion. Do you ever have the soot come down on you when it starts up?

As mentioned before, if it has to be done will use mild steel for fuel tanks, but would like to know why the built in epoxy tanks arent recommended. Reviewed the Gougeon book and they showed one built in on one of thier sailboats.

Peace.

 

that alone is a good reason. All it takes is small amount if alcohol based additives or ethanol requirement and your epoxy tanks will melt.

Mild steel will rust. When you buy an old motorbike the typical problem is rusted tank. Make the tank bigger and put it in a boat and the problem is much more likely to occur.

 

btw. why do you ask for advise when you seem to actively ignore it?

 

The Gougeons did it as an experiment. What is the condition of that tank today? You should email them and find out and never rely on hearsay about anything. If a built in Epoxy tank does leak the tiniest amount, it soaks the ply with fuel, not a good thing and quite forseeable. It just takes critical thinking to answer these things for yourself. Do your research just like science and never believe something just because someone told you so or you read it in a book, any book. Steel tanks have a known and proven life and if you think ahead can be easily replaced or serviced out of the boat and when you run your craft onto the breakwater in a sou'easter and she gets pounded to bits as we see can happen to even 117,000 ton 900 foot cruise ships, the fuel is not released into the environment but can be salvaged along with the tank. The stack comes from my industrial fishboat and CG experience on how many things can go wrong and how very quickly. It has a 90 degree soft bend aluminum adjustable top that can be turned downwind and locked. The deck bucket is hanging on that in the first photo. When sailing with the whole main (Chinese is often sailed with bottom panel raised) or using the watersail this piece is removed. The deck bucket is stowed over the exhaust when not in use as a cap, and as a place to stow the deck bucket. Having as many things as possible solve two problems at once gives you more room and less problems. BERTIE is a total rip-off of other peoples' problem solving solutions and industrial sailboat ideas from the last 500 years without a hint of yacht design other than modern hardware and winches, so I rarely have problems to solve, since others have done it for me and this boat has existed before in very similar form many thousands of times since it's based on the common floating industrial "trucks" of the past and did not come from the mind of any one designer, but from surviving and profiting from the sea. Darwinism applies brutally to commercial boat designs because if it does not work well enough in the real world of the real ocean (the most hostile environment on earth where without a boat you're dead of hypothermia in an hour) to make money it does not get built again. This type of vessel has been formed by evolution as surely as my fingers that type this. Fantasy craft have no such barriers to existence but exist for whimsy so can be conjured out of thin air and ignorance, like some ancient social institutions.

 

Man with "endowed intelligence", did throughtout the centuries have boats evolve with certain characteristics to perform functions, the Lord who gave them that intelligence is the same one who created your hand. Disorder happens when things are left alone.

Of all the places, I was thought evolution in catholic school, after schooling, I lived like the devil, life was hopeless and worthless, but the Lord helped me and revealed how He is the Great God of all. Those other institions just play a game called churchianity and have nothing to do with the Great God, you dont need them, just ask Him to reveal Himself to you through His Son Jesus the Christ and wisdom will be granted unto you.

 

1. Your smokestack works well for your application but would be less than ideal here. Probably will go with side exhaust, gradual loop up to deck then terminate 12" above WL, with antisiphon near top.

2. Dont intend to knock over breakwaters. Epoxy diesel tank info is hard to come by, but there are no known failures using it with diesel fuel. Doubt they will use alchohol in diesel but if it happened there would be enough forewarning to be able to add manufactured tanks.

3. Want to have passive venting, an electric fan drawing air under the engine would be great, but dont trust having electronics perform that vital function, maybe only as a supplement but not full time. As drawn, intake is 9" above cockpit floor and will drain quickly. Hope none will get in, but if it doese, bilge pump will take over any that gets in but it would come in right above the engine, thought about making the intake elevated above the rear hatch.

4. For roll control while maintaining shallow draft and lowering cog, bolt two 3/16" x 6" plates at each side of hull bottom and tack weld 9" x 3/4" X 17'-0" plate horizontally. Unbolt, fully weld and add in keel coolers, reattach with epoxy and bolts. CLR will be aft of ideal location but will solve roll problem.

 

Sorry Goodwilly, we will always disagree. I am quite happy to be the scientific atheist I am, needing proof or at least evidence to change my ideas. Religion will never provide that because there is nothing there but man's need to have someone to tell him what to do so he does not have to think for himself. Big Sky Daddy does not exist, only human institutions who use the threat of eternal hell as an excuse to concentrate money and power. The obscure and violent social ideas of a bronze-age desert tribe of pastoralists and their quaint folk tales of human origins would have remained just that if the Romans had not recognized that xtianity is the religion of slaves, and promoted it so thoroughly. If JC really did live, he was a radical revolutionary who was executed for telling the truth about money and power, not divine except in the way all revolutionaries are, willing to die for what they know is right. I respect Ho Chi Minh more. At least I know he existed. The bible is full of contradictions and wild claims and incest, child ****, slavery, insane retributions etc, so how can I possibly respect it when it's obviously the work of charlatans and the criminally insane?

 

Nobody 'intends' to knock over breakwaters anymore than nobody intends to get in an auto accident, yet they happen all the time.
Remember Robert Burns, "The best laid plans of mice and men, aft gang a-ley."
Your lack of actual H2O experience shines brightly if you are so naive to think you are in control when you venture on the watery deep.
You're precisely the kind of arrogant idiot I always had to pull out of the water in my CG SAR time.

 

Why waste so much energy on trying to stop the building of this ark. I think it should be built to the biblical standards and and allow the builder to succeed or fail as god wills.

 

people are not trying to stop but to help. Even the most critical ones are providing tons of useful help.

 

He must not trust god since he keeps asking us instead of him.