DIY catamaran design?

Would you please tell me that the Braincells.exe is a software or knowledge?

I had search for a while, but no luck to find the software.

Would you please give me the home page of BrainCells.exe?

 

Obviously yes. One example from pre-history is Plyboats. I design all my hard chine boats on it, and there was a re-write that was done that would have been awesome, but the line went silent, I think the designer may have passed on. I hope not. I became aware that a lot of people still use plyboats. You can still design boats in it, and it takes only half an hour to do the first one, then one works with it, and it goes through revisions, but it is super easy to get ideas onto. I am currently working on a power boat, that I am not sure will turn out, maybe too much twist in the panels. I will get it together, however.

With small boats you can often design on the fly, or build models. It is pretty easy to calc displacement in one's head, then you can find the CB from a model, and off you go. You can make a ply or glass model in an hour or two.

While you get a lot of fancy pants answers, the most popular catamaran design out there was not designed on software, goes for some of the most popular tris also. The early guys didn't even do any calcs, they just winged it. You aren't going to win the americas cup that way, but you can make a serviceable boat. from a relatively small knowledge base. Jim Brown told us that designing tris was great because the ama tended to bury, and cancel helm problems. A lot of people were taken by Miss Cindy. Her keel was designed after initial sea trials. But if you are making race boats, and the mold is going to cost more than most of our lifetime boating budgets, you need to get it right, within the first 3 or 4 test hulls, so you want to at least pretend you know what you are doing. though even there, they make lots of changes, and parts fall off under loads.

The problem is resale, which isn't a problem if you don't build too big, which is normally a mistake anyway, lots of designer boats have very poor resale also, as is also the case with many production boats. Biggest problem is that people don't manage the issue, which is easily done if one focuses on it.

Another problem is that there can be a lot of stress in boatbuilding, a lot of first time projects founder. A personal design can make stress much higher (fear), or much lower (all parts are locally sourced, within one's comfort zone, etc...). Again, it is a management issue.

Then given that plans are normally a good idea, why would one not use them? Rational reason is that no available designs fit one's needs, that is OK, but is that because one's ideas are stupid or dangerous, or does one have very personal ideas that make a lot of sense, but are not everyone else's cup of tea. A good example of the later was the Tremolino, though at that time Olin went to Newick, but today, there are many people who could pull that off (though their name recognition might be zero). Newick who was a serious multihull guy, might not have seen the appeal of cannibalizing a hobie, but it had appeal to others. Other people have done similar things with surplus Tornadoes, were they wrong to do it? I think there are all kinds of rational exceptions, and if one is really at the point where one might consider designing one's own boat, one is probably aware of many of them. I have designed two cats around the needs of fly fishing, and have a tri in the planing stage that is also fly fishing influenced. It will only be 20-21 feet long, so no huge risk, but I am not sure what tri designer out there actually knows tris, and flyfishing better than I do.