Problem near Port Townsend?

[AlanT]

The whole story of that delivery 31 years ago could flesh out a small book, but suffice it to say, after the desertion of the owner and his two relatives after a rough night rounding Point Conception, I was left alone aboard in Morro Bay with the final destination of San Francisco. With seas moderating a day later, I set off and ended up calling the Coast Guard as the big Detroits began to show signs of clogging filters - too rough to attempt replacing them (no switchable filters here). The USCG suggested a cove 20-30 miles south of Monterey, and in a couple hours I was safely anchored and able to go below where I discovered the water up to the top of the engine stringers with four wonky Par diaphragm bilge pumps (the one with the belt-driven pump) all lined up on a mounting board spinning away pumping nothing. Every one of them had a mechanical problem ranging from stripped set screws on the gears to broken belts lying alongside the pump. Float switches in the various remote compartments serviced had activated them, and maybe they had pumped for a bit early on. Being at anchor with the engines secured made for a quiet and calm engine room, but the leak was not there. I ending up in the forward bilge on my knees up to my neck in water approaching the deck over my head when I saw an up-welling on the surface of the water. My hand found the half-inch diameter aluminum pipe supplying the water maker coming up from the keel (aluminum hull) gushing water. The water maker was mounted to a board which oddly was not secured, and the rough seas which had stirred the gunk up in the fuel tanks causing the clogging of filters in turn causing me to turn into the cover had shaken the water maker around until it broke the supply pipe which by the way had no seacock valve. A rag and a screw driver stopped the leak, but I still had no operable bilge pump; so I reached up over my head and yanked the hose loose from the forward shower pan drain, stuck it into the water and turned on the shower drain pump from inside the shower stall. It took a few hours, but I had a dry bilge before bedtime. This epic included the 13-foot Boston Whaler dink breaking free on the upper deck and swinging around at the end of its crane in 14-foot seas; the swim platform coming loose under my feet as I rescued the dink; a fire breaking out on the stove while underway one night; and the hydraulic steering gong mushy causing me to ending sliding under the Golden Gate sort of sideways. Deliveries can be so much fun. The boat was left safely moored to a pier in San Fran with the dink in place on top in its cradle and the swim step lashed along side it ready for a the repair gang to reattach it and sort out the steering and correct the water maker issues.

Great story and adventure! Thanks for sharing. ~Alan

 

[DDW]

Hawkshaw1 wrote;
“Is a FRP considered superior to wood. It would have to be stronger, right?”

It depends on what kind of strength. Salesmen of the then new FG boats usta upend them on a beach and take a shot at them with a rifle. No hole.
But FG lacks stiffness and most boats use copious amounts of wood in their hulls to keep the bottom from collapsing. All other solutions to the weak FG bottom were too expensive. And FG is heavy. Another reason to use wood. Use a different kind of wood for each part. Can’t do that w FG. So most FG boats are heavier than wood boats.

The wood/FG story re strength is much more complicated than that but the bottom line is that FG takes a bigger beating bumping into rocks near the beach or in the river but waves can break a FG boat in two whereas a wood boat on the same waves May survive.

Those are some gross characterizations. Fiberglass is denser than wood. That is about the only thing you can say for sure. The strength of fiberglass is between a little and a lot stronger than wood, and the stiffness roughly the same. But typical wood and fiberglass hulls are constructed very differently, and that is what will determine its strength, stiffness, weight, and damage resistance. A properly engineered and constructed fiberglass hull will be stronger, stiffer, and lighter than wood - this is why there are no serious racing sailboats built of wood anymore. Damage resistance is a difficult subject as it covers a large array of possibilities - there are examples where each material may be better than the other.

 

[Nomad Willy]

DDW,
Compare per pound.
Wood is much stronger unless one uses exotic sub materials or building methods not economical for most boats.
I keep seeing a new word “wonky”.
What’s it supposta mean?

 

[syjos]

DDW,
Compare per pound.
Wood is much stronger unless one uses exotic sub materials or building methods not economical for most boats.
I keep seeing a new word “wonky”.
What’s it supposta mean?

I agree. A wood epoxy composite hull is lighter, stiffer and stronger than a fiberglass hull. Traditional plank on frame wood boats are a different matter.

Wood is used as a coring material in modern cold molded boats and covered in a variety of modern fabrics to yield the strength and stiffness required in a light hull. Wood/epoxy composite race boats are very competitive.

Read "Gougeon Brothers on Boat Construction" or "Professional Boatbuilder" magazine and you will see that wood is a superior boat building material.

One off custom hulls are built using cold molding over a simple frame. Too expensive and time consuming to build a plug and mold for one FRP hull.

The reason you don't see many series production boats cold molded is cost. It's more economical to lay fabric and resin in a mold than cold molding. Less skilled workers to laminate than wood and the process, once the mold is built, is faster. The cost of the plug and mold is amortized over the entire production run.

The Thistle sailboat was originally series produced in wood. The hull was hot molded in a mold with wood strips.

Here's a cold molded boat being built with thin wood strips.

 

[Nomad Willy]

syjos,
My comments above were thinking in terms of typical wood boats that were common in the 50’s and 60’s.

I don’t think you could build a typical FG boat and compare it to a typical plywood boat. By typical I mean built in the typical most economic way. If one was to make a 14’ FG skiff that was the same weight as a 14’ plywood skiff it wouldn’t last a day in the hands of teenage water skiers.
People think that “better” = better in all ways. Not so. In this “case” cost and durability obliterate all other considerations. Evolution wise FG won and is the most common boat building material .. for small boats to about 50’.
But because FG won the marketing game dosn’t mean they are better in all ways. New cars are better than old cars. Yes but they don’t ride as smooth and are generally are less comfortable. Like boats they are better in certain important ways. In numerous other ways they are inferior but it could be (for example) that the new thing is just cheaper and inferior in all other ways.

 

[psneeld]

not sure I can agree the fiberglass boats are inferior in numerous other ways......

 

[DNT99611]

It is really easy to see what is the strongest material when weight is equal. Take a 4x8 sheet of 3/4 plywood, put one end up on a cinder block, and walk up it. Do the same thing with a sheet of steel, aluminum, or glass and see what happens. There is no perfect building material they all have good and bad traits.

 

[syjos]

It is really easy to see what is the strongest material when weight is equal. Take a 4x8 sheet of 3/4 plywood, put one end up on a cinder block, and walk up it. Do the same thing with a sheet of steel, aluminum, or glass and see what happens. There is no perfect building material they all have good and bad traits.

The weight of the materials will differ because of the thickness required to achieve a certain strength with each material. The plywood will be lighter than an equal strength aluminum, steel or FG.

The metal would need to be thicker and the glass will require reinforcement via coring.

Read chapter 3 in Gougeon Brothers on Boat Construction regarding wood as a structural material. The book is available as a free download from WEST.

 

[hollywood8118]

Another great attribute of cored hulls are they are insulated better and quiet
HOLLYWOOD

 

[syjos]

not sure I can agree the fiberglass boats are inferior in numerous other ways......

Not saying FRP boats are inferior. They are more robust and can be banged around without major damage and repairs are not overly difficult.

Wood is still a viable core for one off custom boat building especially for it's stiffness and strength to weight.

 

[psneeld]

Not saying FRP boats are inferior. They are more robust and can be banged around without major damage and repairs are not overly difficult.

Wood is still a viable core for one off custom boat building especially for it's stiffness and strength to weight.

All true...... it was someone else that said what I disputed.

 

[DDW]

DDW,
Compare per pound.
Wood is much stronger unless one uses exotic sub materials or building methods not economical for most boats.
I keep seeing a new word “wonky”.
What’s it supposta mean?

Not true. Wood has an ultimate tensile of around 10ksi and is a very unidirectional material. Good bidirectional laminate in fiberglass is around 40ksi. It is about 2.5 times as dense as wood but 4 times stronger, so it's specific strength is higher. If made unidirectional (like wood) somewhat higher still. Same story on stiffness. Sure if laid up with a chopper gun it will be weak and floppy. Bad wood is weak too. If you want to go exotic carbon is much higher in strength, stiffness, and lower density.

Nobody builds serious race boats out of cold molded wood, or wood cored laminate these days. 30 years ago, sure.

 

[syjos]

From Bedard Yacht Design:

Wood’s good!

In today’s boating world, a lot of noise is created around hull material. The magic word is fiberglass of course, and for good reason. It is strong, virtually maintenance free and makes boating affordable for the masses.

Fiberglass boats are not made only of fiberglass; otherwise they’d be TOO HEAVY.
But is it the miracle material that it is claimed to be? From the manufacturer’s point of view it is, because the tremendous expense of a plug and mold can be offset by the quick turnout and low labor required to produce glass hulls.

But pure fiberglass is bendy and quite heavy for its strength. The workaround to bendiness is to make the hull thicker, but that makes it heavy. The workaround for weight is to use sandwich construction (to lay a core between the fiberglass skins), but that’s expensive, both in labor and materials. A good compromise is to use plywood or balsa as a core. See how fast we come back to wood/epoxy!?

Wood/Epoxy is not wood construction, it’s COMPOSITE
Wood/Epoxy, on the contrary, embraces the best of modern and traditional boat building. It is not strictly speaking a wooden boat. It uses space-age technology to create a cored laminate protected by perfectly waterproof envelope. Epoxy has got vastly superior adhesion than either polyester or vinylester (remember the fiberglass boat’s ply-cored deck? Polyester…). The plywood shell is assembled in a matter of hours using plastic ties, fairs naturally which reduces finishing time tremendously, and takes a significant portion of the load of the structure. It is DIY-friendly, requires no mold and little or no support. Perfectly suited for one-off construction, the design is as modern as money can buy (fiberglass builders are reluctant to retire their expensive molds, so hulls are often 20 or 30 year old). And we didn’t even get into the most important aspect: Wood/Epoxy is cheaper and lighter than any other boat building method!

The most BANG for your BUCK
wood epoxy comparison,
To compare apples with apples, let’s consider a panel from the bottom of a boat, 1ft by 1ft. This panel is required to have a certain strength and stiffness. How much, and how heavy will this panel be out of the most common boat manufacturing laminates and how do they compare with wood/Epoxy?

Chop gun is the least expensive way to make a fiberglass boat. Wet chopped glass is sprayed into a mold and rolled down after a layer of gelcoat.

Cored composite: Into a mold are laid gelcoat, outer-skin, core (balsa, plywood or foam) and inner skin.

The problem with Chop gun is that the fibers are short (±1in.) and the thickness sprayed is not precise so the strength is limited and somewhat hard to predict. The solution to these two problems is to lay it in thicker, but fiberglass is heavy, as we’ll see in a minute.

Cored laminate, on the other hand, is a good way to reduce weight; it uses a core to separate the fiberglass skins. The drawback is that it is time-consuming and therefore expensive to build. Not to mention that the core is most of the time wood of some form… So out goes the maintenance-free dream.

Now let’s go back to our bottom panel. Built out of wood/epoxy, it will cost $4.40 and will weigh 7lb. In order to meet the strength/stiffness of this panel, we’ll have to spend $5.37 (20% more) for a chop-gun laminate and this will weigh 16lb (almost 2.5x more!). A cored laminate will weigh a little less than 5lb, which is nice but it will set us back $6.93 (60% more). Oh, and did I mention that the core of that laminate is balsa wood?

Plus, a one-off construction is going to come together much quicker for a wood/epoxy boat since the panels take their shape without mold and fair naturally.

So when considering your next boat, keep in mind that using wood/epoxy is not only easy and fun to put together, it will also make a boat that performs better and will cost less to build and operate.

For the source:

https://www.bedardyachtdesign.com/articles/woods-good/

 

[markpierce]

So, how's about steel?

 

[syjos]

January 2020 article in Yachting World:

https://www.yachtingworld.com/extra...ce-boat-oui-fling-baron-irvine-laidlaw-124812

 

[syjos]

So, how's about steel?

I'm a wood, epoxy, FRP, composite guy.

Don't know nothing about steel. Never learned to weld ..... well.

 

[Nomad Willy]

syjos,
Good information.
I wasn’t even thinking about composite construction. And only the occasional backyard boat is built w/o epoxy and other newer stuff.
I remember my father running his 26’ Saber Craft from Juneau to Angoon and on Chatham Strait and he ran into a stiff southerly and most likely 3’ seas or worse. Beat all the windows out of the boat (typical express cruiser) but no other damage. The 26’ plywood inboard boat was built by numerous manufacturers .. all of them light. Owens at the upper limit. But most of them were built in the PNW.
And what was considered to be quality boats in the 70’s had certain areas that were laid up w a chopper gun. Maybe/probably they still use the gun in certain areas.

And re my argument that at least plywood boats are stronger than FG but at least most and perhaps all FG boats made now are composite. Most I’ll guess have ..1 1/2” wood (fir?) stringers to give the bottom sufficient stiffness. FG tested in a lab can come out smelling good but in a boat slamming into seas for hours it needs it’s bottom heavily re-enforced w 2X4 or bigger wood (typically 4 stringers) to reduce the flexing to tolerable levels.

Woods biggest structural problem is the fact that a wood boat is built out of many pieces all glued or glued and screwed or bolted together. These fasteners like the screws that hold the bottom and side planks or sheathing (ply) to the frames are subjected to slight movement as the hull works while in use. Depending on the severity of the usage the boat may be in need of being re-fastened every 20 - 30yrs.
But you can fix a wood boat quite easily by simply replacing the damaged parts or part. The ability to repair wood boats to a large degree makes up for the fact that they do rot over a long period of time.

 

[Nomad Willy]

Mark,
Steel is heavy. OK not a marvelous revelation but the thing that controls the usage of steel in boat construction. And as a pleasureboat building a steel boat that’s “fair” is basically impossible. But flat bottom, chine bottom or multichine boats can and are built that are reasonably fair. But most all steel boats don’t have the fair surfaces of a wood boat and thus will never be beautiful in that sense. Good looking boats to be sure .. like yours.

But once you accept the imperfection of un-fair lines and surfaces there is only weight and rust to overcome.

Weight has some limiting design factors to gaurd against but as long as every pound put aboard the boat is considered and the weight of all things with-in the hull is not too much for the boat to support. Usually this is not a big deal but should one should be aware.

Rust is something I shouldn’t write about as my knowledge is limited. But in owning a steel boat you’ll become familiar w primers, coating systems and other demons around the technical world of metal boat building and repair that wood and FG boat owners need not attend.

 

[Benthic2]

Can't you bend steel into any shape you want ??

 

[DNT99611]

Over the years I have built boats ranging from 18 foot to 36. They have been wood/epoxy, solid glass and cored glass. I can not weld so no metal boats. The wood/epoxy is a great way to build but you must be fanatic about never breaking the glass coat and making a path for water to enter. Cored boats are great but getting the core bonded correctly is the key. And you will not get that from minim wage help on a consistent basis. Solid glass is pretty forgiving. The problem is getting it stiff enough. That means building it way too thick and heavy or putting a lot of bracing inside and that takes time driving the build cost up. If I ever build another larger boat it will be solid glass below the waterline and a mixture of composites for the rest.

 

[rslifkin]

Fiberglass boats don't necessarily need wood stringers, but they do need the right shapes and structure to provide stiffness. As an example, my boat has fiberglass stringers with no core. They're fairly tall in most areas for stiffness and are just hollow fiberglass boxes. Basically a U shape glassed to the hull. The famously beefy older Chris Craft Commanders of the 60s used basically the same design.

 

[Portage_Bay]

Can't you bend steel into any shape you want ??

Yes. But the welding at the seams and to the frames and stringers distorts the steel a bit. That's the biggest reason a steel hull is not as fair as wood can be.

 

[twistedtree]

Anything more on what happened to the boat in Port Townsend? Whatever went wrong I'm sure we can all learn from it.

 

[Nomad Willy]

Twist,
I’ve been wondering too.
Where could there be a hole that would match the half told tale?

 

[DDW]

Syjos, that article is way out of date, and the boat you reference an anachronism, not a serious racing boat. Core materials are foam or honeycomb these days, layups are done using closed mold techniques. The article conflates material stiffness with structural section along with other misconceptions. Sure, if you are going to replace wood with solid chopper gun layup, then stick with wood. Any material can be used poorly. Wood is cheap, but labor intensive to work, the resulting product is not cheap (unless homebuilt and the labor is free).

Wood is no longer used to build airplanes or racing boats, where weight, strength, and stiffness are critical; nor in production boats where cost is king. All replaced by composites.

 

[slowgoesit]

I thought this thread was about a boat beached near Port Townsend . . . . It's become a wood vs FRP thread, maybe moderator move to a new thread?


Anyone have any update on what happened to the boat in the original post?

 

[Nomad Willy]

DDW “solid chopper gun” ....
and you’re accusing another poster for misleading input.

This is not an attack as I like your input almost always.

Slowgoeit,
I gave up on the sinking.

 

[syjos]

Syjos, that article is way out of date, and the boat you reference an anachronism, not a serious racing boat. Core materials are foam or honeycomb these days, layups are done using closed mold techniques. The article conflates material stiffness with structural section along with other misconceptions. Sure, if you are going to replace wood with solid chopper gun layup, then stick with wood. Any material can be used poorly. Wood is cheap, but labor intensive to work, the resulting product is not cheap (unless homebuilt and the labor is free).

Wood is no longer used to build airplanes or racing boats, where weight, strength, and stiffness are critical; nor in production boats where cost is king. All replaced by composites.

The boat pictured above may be an "anachronism" but it is still a competetive cold molded race boat built recently. There are many examples of such boats built to race in various classes. Here's a picture of a smaller cold molded boat.

If "serious racing boat" refers to Americas Cup, offshore, ocean crossing, around the world race boats, of course the most modern methods and space age materials are utilized.

The article may be out of date but the properties of wood and it's structural characteristics has not changed.

Have you heard of Rybovich? They build custom wood powerboats.