Art/Design student requesting help.

Patrick,

In summary, you have been “Press Ganged” into designing a sailing craft but you have no knowledge of the subject, and probably little interest. Your drawing suggests you have in mind, a length of 20’ and a beam of 8’. You have given no other information, but reading the drawing suggests heavy displacement, ie a weight carrying design not a fast craft. Your assignment will have the design tested at a scale of 1:12 or 1’ 8”.

Please understand that a number of the participants in this forum who have responded to you are highly experienced designers, boatbuilders and sailors. They have directed to you appropriate publications because, design is to these people with decades of experience a matter literally of life or death. That is there duty, because bad design at full scale - kills.

If this forum is to be helpful to you; and there have been broadly similar requests from many students in the past, most perhaps more marine orientated than yourself, you have to do some of the work, or at least make the key decisions.

Is your craft, if it were built full scale, to be load carrying, or light and perhaps as PAR suggests radical? Be warned, 99.9% of the good ideas have already been had. The genius of the great designers is not necessarily to come up with something completely novel, it is to combine existing ideas in new and better ways, then perhaps add the 0.1% special. It’s strange, but that which works well usually looks good, too.

Some basic rules of thumb for a non-designer…

1. Both wind and water flow, neither like going around sharp corners.
   
2. Wind is air moving and air has mass. That is where your energy comes from, turbulence is wasted energy.
   
3. A viable sailing craft must be able to sail up wind (or to use sailor speak “to windward”). That will require resistance to the sideways push of the wind.
   
4. The sideways push of the wind will attempt to heel the craft. Stability will be needed to counterbalance that force. This can come from weight below the hull, or from hull shape as one side of the hull is pushed down and the other lifted, or from human weight moving to balance the boat.

All that requires you to make decisions. Then, to allow you to communicate your ideas, you need to look at plans, there are many on the internet and understand the way in which they represent a hull in 3 dimensions. Make your decisions, as if you were building a full size craft, that is how it appears your assessment will work, then having reviewed other sets of plans, draw a suitable sketch and post it. PAR and others who have responded to you are outstanding sources of knowledge and you will then have put them in a position to give you advice.

For a diverse range of plans, look up Selway Fisher, Paul Gartside or Tom Dunderdale of Campion Sail and Design or PAR's own designs.

 

PatrickH If you want to start moving on with this I am happy to help with advice and comment, you can PM me.