Dan, you say most homebuilders fail. How could you even know that? I've tried to find stats on how many home builds there have been, and how many failures, but cant find any. Did you?
You won't find stats. You pick it up here and there. There is no one tracking this but I have read many a book on home building boats and used to be a member of the Metal Boat Society(MBS). Heck, I still might be but the MBS website had major problems for years so I stopped reading. There was much discussion on their website about building your own boat.
The boat building books would mention how many start the build but do not finish.
The MBS magazine would often, if not always, have/had unfinished boats for sale. These boats will be in various states of completeness and build quality. I have followed home building blogs and most have not finished. The blog simply stops getting updated. I count my father's desire to build our boat in this as well. We started the site prep work and he bought the building plans, which were not ,and are not, cheap. We never started actually building the boat before he saw sense and just bought a boat so we could go sailing.
Building your own boat was the thing to do in the 70's and 80's. I do remember one guy that finished his boat back then. He spent something like 10 years building his cement boat and did get it in the water. I wish I knew what happened to that boat. Can't imagine that owner would still be alive.
The rule of thumb, for metal boats at least, is that it takes an hour of work for every four pounds of boat. For the boats we have looked at building, it will take 6-8 years, of 40 hour work weeks with 50 weeks in a year. That is one person working full time on the boat. How many people can work full time on the boat and hold down a job?
If one works 20 hours a week on the boat, while having a full time job, the time to build is 12-16 years. Not many people are going to be able to sustain that work effort with while working a full or part time job. Even if one had the money to NOT work to support oneself and the boat build, 6-8 years is a ALONG time.
I read one blog where the guy did finish his boat. Mostly. It was finished so that the boat could go sailing but the build was not 100% complete. He worked on the boat for 30 years. Yes, 30 years. Three decades and there was still work to do.
Building the hull is the easy part. It is roughly 10-20% of the cost in time and money to build the boat. This is why so many unfinished home built boats are just the hull. The home builder gets a small part of the boat done, at a great time cost, and stops for a variety of reasons.
Lets look at this a different way. If it takes eight years for one person working full time to build the boat, then lets get more people working on the boat!
That is what one successful home builder did. He hired out the welding of the hull to speed things up but he, his wife, and just a little help from friends built the boat. I do mean a little help. Not a lot time wise. By the rule of thumb, it would take eight years to build his boat and it took them eight years BUT with more than one person helping the build. However, the time frame does NOT include the time they spent getting to the point of actually building the boat.
They have a great boat.
Building a boat takes a great deal of money, time and a variety of skills that most people did not possess. That means one has to spend more time and money learning these skills, hiring out the job to people with the skills(more money but faster), or hacking the work. There is no escaping this reality.
Later,
Dan