Scarab 16

So, good luck to you!

Michel

 

I bought plans for both the 16, and the 18. I was seriously considering building the 16, but the main hangup I had over it was that I don't think I could rig it alone. I don't really see an easy way to just launch, it, and I already have a 24 tri I built that sails great and trailers badly. So I think I will go with the 18. Another factor, probably minor to most, is that the 18 trailering package is smaller. It is under 7' I think it would make a more comfortable package to handle when going through a huge city with cars at max speed and lane reductions for construction, etc... The package a lot of folders present is just too tight in my opinion. The 16 is just enough wider to be less pleasant.

Sailing wise, the18 will obviously be better. And eliminate the doubts that a lot of people obviously have about the 16. Indeed, just guessing here, but I think Ray may have decided to drop the S18 prices because people were talking of building the 16 rather than manning up and buying the 18 plans. Why launch a lot of crap boats under your name, when you aren't even getting the revenue.

I would not build the 16 for the cost saving, You will be kicking yourself in the butt for years wondering why you cheapped out a grand or so , when the boat is so obviously worse, and involves most of the time consuming building anyway. You are just going to hate yourself for molding four solid glass beams, when much the same work would have got you the beams for the 18. Same with lofting, etc...

I think the 18 can be built a lot lighter in wood than has been suggested. 5.2mm ply is one angle, but another option is 4mm and then buck it up a bit. The Bucc was made of 4, at 24 feet. But it will be specific to materials you can actually get when you build. I am currently leaning towards building the main hull in carbon and corecell (only because of some rocking deal). And I am thinking of building the beams and amas of wood. The amas can be built in either 3 or 4 mm depending on various stuff. My 24 was designed with 3mm amas for coastal, 4mm for offshore. In corecell I hope to be able to dispense with the slow molding tables approach, but it may not be possible with the lines provided. Foam has much higher resale, and it also is pretty much no worry. I think you will never look back if you do the main hull out of that stuff. You may then want to do the rest.

I love wood, and have built all my boats of it, but for real life foam has it's appeal. Little problems become big problems in wood. On the other hand. 30 years into the fleet, and remarkably little damage has befallen my wooden boats. All of it was avoidable, conceptually. Stuff that gets you is illness, divorce, job dislocation. Any life cycle stuff that means you don't get back to the boat. I left one deckplate unfinished, got injured didn't get back to the boat for 2 years, and have been fighting the cancer for ten years. But the boat is still great, and It is all easily and cheaply repaired, I think I have it all now.

My philosophy is go all in or don't. And the don't is largely my thing. The don't is 13 dollar sheet plywood, etc... Don't produce a showroom finish, etc... Make a practical, pro's wooden boat, that cost you 1/4 what anyone else paid, and that you will never sell, in all likelihood. Or waste 4000 hours and 6 years making one that everyone raves about. Just don't do the middle ground where you spend too much money and time, and don't get any kudos or resale.

I built this for 3K + rig, tried to sell it for 4k. Best offer was 1K. So I guess i am glad I only paid 3K, and didn't spend much time long boarding.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnLmKXY-FCg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rrt459Gj0Ck

 

My take on this topic is that I think permanent accommodation on a boat this size is a real waste of space. When one considers that the vast majority of time spent sailing this size boat is day sailing, why waste all the space with a cabin? This is why I really like a catamaran in this size range, you have all the space you can want for the day sailing we mostly do, and if you want to do an over nighter, a great platform for setting up a 2-3 man tent.

 

Eliminating the cabin is a big hit if you really want to micro cruise the boat. Sometime you can get a memorable 30 minutes out of a cabin. A tent isn't practical underway, or as low windage. Many times with kids a kid needs to get a nap, or maybe gets a little scared, or gets bored and can go off on their own.

With tris there are a lot of imaginary cabins. Before signing up for a particular boat, all because it has a cabin be sure the footprint suggested is really usable. Also, with a really small tri, there is a practical limit to how many passengers can be carrier, and the main hull may as well be divided into cockpit and cabin. Once the boat gets a little bigger, I prefer a center cockpit design, but that takes 19-20 feet if one wants a center cockpit.

There is a ton to be said for small cats, particularly the Jarcat, the G32 Redux, and the small Kendrick cat. 4 real berths, better trailer sailing, far simpler build. That said, the folding tri for all it's complexity in the case of the 18, gives you a sub 7 foot beam on the trailer, and a nearly 16 foot beam on the water. You just don't get that with a cat.

 

I can't resist:



My opinion is that tiny cats are better for cruising than tiny tris, and I rattle on endlessly on the subject here.

Of course, the above boat doesn't yet exist, as I've just started the prototype. But there are some unexploited niches in the multihull microcruiser market, if someone can come up with a quick easy folding system.

 

Well they aren't better at getting 16 foot beam on sub 7 foot road width, with fast and easy set-up. The thing that divides design talk from promotional talk, is tying claims to objectives. For some things cats are better, for others they aren't. There is no overall best.

I sure hope you are sneaking up on us with some spectacular folding system Ray, 'cause that is one homely boat. When you release this new folding mechanism, and leave us all gasping at it's brilliance you will have the last laugh.

 

Tell us what you really think... Have you seen an attractive microcruiser with "cabins" under 20'? Length is sexy in multihulls.

Dan

 

Well, if I were a very very small man, say, Munchkin size, I suppose it could be a lot prettier. Maybe a nice paint job and some gingham curtains will help...

Boats vary a lot more in size than the human body does, alas. If you want sitting headroom (40 inches with 4 inch foam on the flats), you have to have cabins of a certain height, even on a boat like this, that gets the maximum freeboard out of 4 foot wide plywood. In this case. the cabins are 21 inches high, which is not terrible. The flared hulls mean that to have bunks of adequate width, you must place them high enough in the hulls, and if the bunks will also function as seats, there must be leg room and enough height to be comfortable above the sole.

I'm trying to think of a prettier cruising cat under 20 feet, with similar amenities, but I'm coming up empty. There just aren't many cats in that size, except for the Jarcats, which are not beautiful to many eyes. Many of the little tris, including, I think, the Scarab 16, do not appear to have even sitting headroom below-- comfort has been dispensed with in favor of looks and speed. When you look on the websites of many small multi designers, you get no information about the ergonomics of the cabins, or even photographs of these interiors. There is an unfortunate tendency among some designers to regard the boat as little more than a platform to link sails and foils in the most efficient way. This is fine for daysailing but after a few hours it gets old.

Oh well. The hulls are almost identical in proportion to Slider's hulls, which can be moderately attractive from some angles.



Thom, I don't think I claimed that cats were better at folding to a narrow package for trailering, or that cats were better at unfolding to maximum beam. That seems a pretty narrow set of criteria to me, and I don''t think I'd want to choose a cruising boat based on those qualities alone. What I claimed is that little cats are better for beachcruising than little tris, and I think I make a good case for that position. Little cats are more comfortable under way and at anchor, and have much more usable deck space, an important issue with very small cruisers. Cats are better load-carriers than tris, another important consideration for very small boats, and especially very small multis which are already short on displacement. They have disadvantages as well-- the folding you mention, and the fact that a properly designed tri will have less wetted surface than a cat and will be faster in light air. You're certainly welcome to disagree, but I'm sure you can come up with a better argument than "Harrumph! There are no absolutes!"

Of course there are no absolutes, but for any given purpose and any two non-identical boats, one will be better for that purpose than the other. That's just how the universe works.

Finally, I'm not sure why you regard my post as "promotional." I have nothing to sell in connection with this boat, and won't for years, if ever. I'm trying to share the design and building process on my blog and elsewhere partly because I would find a similar attempt by someone else fascinating, and partly because it helps me to think about what I'm doing. If this offends you, I'm sorry, and I advise you to pay me no more attention. Though I would regret that, as your posts are always interesting.

 

Ray that's just what I'm getting at. I think there's few boats out there, cat or tri, that give anything to the seated human form. The Jarcat, Chris O's cabin cat, and a few others. For tris, there are more options, but none really look like you could sit. I remember reading about a Wharram where, "you can sit down but not sit up." I imagine the Reynolds 21 and the smaller Stilletto to be much in the same category. They look pretty decent, but I couldn't really fit in one. Small sub 20' monos have the same trouble. I can't sit up in any of the monos in production. I'm sure that low slung look is helpful in sailing qualities, but not for cruising. I'm unable to finance or devote the hours necessary to making a bigger cruising cat. I once sailed on Gilbert & Sullivan a 36' modified Tennant Tourissimo 10. Great boat, but I couldn't devote the 7,000 hours of labor much less the cost. Some can--go for it! But carefully evaluate why you build a big boat so you don't have an expensive boondoggle or destroyed relationships.

Smaller boats=smaller comittments. In some ways that's a very good thing. I'm sure Ray's Slinger will be lost less fast than the beachcat the rig is grabbed from. I'm also sure that it's going to be more comfortable. I'm still of the mindset that stretching it out to 24' would help it a bit visually, but that's Ray's call.

As for Cats abilities as cruisers, there are many advantages even compared to tris. This is true on the small end of the scale and the large. End ties are spendy! Being quick enough to trailer or get in a standard slip is important. Corsairs are the most sucessful tris on the market because they work well folding. Eliminate that, and they'd have a tiny percentage of their sales. Cats have not approached that level of folding sucess, but if they did I'd be interested--if only in the small sizes.

Dan

 

I think I can sit down in this, but it still looks like what it is, an early concept.

By the way with Adobe reader 9, this is a 3d model that can be turned and looked at. How cool is that! I love it when I discover something new about this computer stuff.

 

Very nice! It does look as though you have some headroom. It might not look like a greyhound of the ocean-- but that's something that just doesn't seem possible with these tiny boats and the size of human beings.

One thing I might think about is that the amount of tumblehome in the cabin sides does not allow a person to sit back against the sides without hunching forward. That's one of the many balancing acts involved in a design this small, I suppose. You want some tumblehome for aerodynamics and looks, but not so much that it forces someone sitting in the cabin into an unnatural posture. If you have enough beam, you could use a removable seat back to put the sitter into a more comfortable posture, and in any case, a berth wide enough to be comfortable sleeping is too wide for sitting, so some provision has to made for converting it.

Working on such a tiny canvas forces you into making very rigorous choices, which is not entirely bad.

I was interested to see the choices that the designer of the Scarab 16 made when designing a little trailable cat. Drawings can be seen here.

It's an 18 footer with fixed highway-legal beam. It has only a little more sail area than Slider, but weighs two and a half times as much. It's hard to see how it would be much faster than the little monohull cruisers that Slider runs away from, but I'll bet it's vastly more comfortable than, say, a Catalina 22, even if the Catalina has a lot more internal volume.

 

Ray,
That is very handy input.

This type of boat luckily has some rather ugly forefathers, so it matters little that it does not look like a wet leopard (sleek, fast and beautiful...)

I made a real effort to look at the ergonomics, and luckily have a boat in progress available to compare my sizes with a real life example ( manie botha's little monohull racer)

I looked at the Scarab 16, and there is no way you can sit up when below. I needed to get some creature comforts incorporated, as the female to male ratio is three to one in my household. (The Daughters are still small, but I hope to still have them willingly along for crew in ten years' time.)

The bunks are literally the only interior structure, all the other stuff is camping style stoves, toilets, ice-boxes etc.

Ironically one of my biggest challenges is the bimini, as I flat-out refuse to be burnt to Pink Panther condition in this harsh place. ( I'm even in the process of bimini-ing my fishing sit on top kayak!)

Questions remaining are many, but beam structure and scantlings of the main parts have to be the next on the list.

 

Is she only for cruising, ie. sailing with bimini up always? If so might have a bimini for you but it means changing the rig...

Short rig, all sails furling, no compression post, no wires, poor upwind performance (no boom), so cruiser only!

How much crawl space under cockpit floor?

 

What cat is that? For camp cruising I am in total agreement. For longer duration or bad weather, I favor a spot to get dry and relax without the tentbound feeling--difficult on small boats in general and multihulls in particular.

Dan

 

In general i think it is rather important to have a dry space to store clothes and equipment (without having it in a sealed locker) and depending on where in the world you sail, you need something to protect you from most of the cold wind and spray. Must admit that i find the drawings of this little nugget to be very nice, specialy the "open car" style of the cabin and wind/spray shield made of glass.

Maybe something for your new boat Ray?