Design Thoughts II

 Here's what wound up being close to the final design.

The idea was to design a boat that would be:

1. Fast to build.

2. Use as many parts as possible from a sacrificial beach cat (Nacra 5.2 in this case)

3. Have a huge cockpit for Watertribe events where bean bags could be set up for comfort as well as a tent. Therefore the sheets will all be lead to either the seatbacks or the coamings to keep the cockpit clear for mooring and tent\bivuoac set up.

4. Have the boat set-up so an anchor can easily be deployed. The design well include and anchor well for an aluminum danforth #9 with bitter end tied off. Having to search for anchor at night when tired always seems a chore.

5. Have enough freeboard where the folks on board are not getting nuked by every splash of water. Trying to keep it a bit dryer and more comfortable.

6. A boat that be rigged from parking the car to ready to splash in less than an hour. 

 Again, this is where the final design of the boat ender up. I thought it would be interesting to try using the rudders and centerboards in the Nacra Hulls for an ease of build stand point. However, my research pointed to the boat not being able to tack nearly as well as with the foil in the main hull. It turns out building the centerboard trunk took less that 30 minutes to build (3 pieces) and I anticipate less that a couple hours to integrate into the structure of the boat.

The cockpit is essentially added to the hull as a secondary component bonded onto the sheer clamps and bulkheads versus being an integrated part of the hull. In the second photo below (purple boat) I was designing a boat with an integrated cockpit. However, there would have been additional layer of complexity although I thing the design looks better. If I were to build this design I would do ply on frame versus stitch and glue as the number hull panel joins really adds to the build time. More so than anything else with drilling, stitching, aligning (the longest part), tightening the stitching, gluing in fillets, taping in fiberglass and finally removing stitching. However, my experience is that the hulls are more fair than using ply on frame as the boat simply takes on the natural curve of the wood. 

So there it is...

Thanks for taking the time if you've gotten this far.