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This will be the last post in this series. The design of QUIDNON is far enough along to start entering actual engineering drawings into CAD. The plan is to use an NC mill to cut out quite a lot of the plywood shapes. To be sure, there will still be some pieces that will end up being precision-fitted using a Sawzall and a grinder. The main assembly technique is what's known as “glue and screw”: some piece of the hull is covered with a thin layer of epoxy, and the next piece is laid over it and screwed down using square-drive stainless steel screws. Each piece to be screwed on is pre-drilled with countersink holes, so that the screws pull the pieces together very tight, squeezing out excess epoxy and creating a very tight bond. Once the plywood shapes are cut out, construction will proceed roughly as follows. 1. On a large flat surface (preferably a hangar of some sort, with a concrete floor), the outer layer of panels that will make up the perfectly flat deck will be laid out, inner...

The cliché of watching someone else’s home movies has always been “It’s always just a saddening bore.” What’s surprising is that the farther we find ourselves removed in time and place, the more these old films have the capacity to move us, to entertain us, or simply to remind us of life as it once was. From My Private Italy , Steve McCurdy Ask around and you’re bound to hear this sentiment about boredom expressed with regard to reading life stories written by “ordinary” people, especially strangers. You even hear it expressed by people about their own stories: “My life is so ordinary. Nobody would be interested enough to read it.” Hold the phone! Notice that McCurdy goes on to state that with time and distance things change. He went on to explain that old home videos have become hot properties now selling to strangers for premium prices on eBay. Various organizations are building archives for documentary purposes. The same thing can happen with life stories. Some memories or stories,...

The primary purpose of QUIDNON is to serve as a floating residence. As such, it has to provide all the usual services that normally involve electricity: refrigeration, lighting, communications and the ability to charge mobile devices (cell phone, tablets, laptops). Where the energy for all this comes from depends on where the boat is. While marinas provide shore power (in North America this is either 30A or 50A 110VAC), this power is unavailable when living at anchor or at a mooring (the two most economical ways to live, since in many places, in Northeastern US especially, marina slip fees can add up to almost as much as renting an apartment on land. With this in mind, I plan to equip QUIDNON for both marina living and for anchoring out. The elements I intend to use to piece together this system are all proven ones—I have used them all and found that they work and hold up extremely well. They are also all relatively cheap, by virtue of the fact that the word "marine" does not...

Jon from Virginia asked a really good question: What happens if one of the rudders gets hit sideways by something or other? Which part of the linkage gives way? Well, this is something that does happen. I once had a towing rode get looped around the rudder blade, and it snapped my autopilot in half. After a bit of head-scratching, I came up with the following arrangement: The stick pointing toward you is one of the tillers, which will actually be made of 1.5" round stock, but I am showing it as 1" square stock so that the drawing is easier to make and understand. The tiller is interrupted by 3 hinged plates (the axes of the hinge pins are shown in red). Front and back plates are welded to the tiller, and the front part of the tiller flops back and forth freely on the hinges. To stop that from happening under normal conditions, the two sides of the tiller are held together using a spring (here shown as a pink rubber band, to make it easier to draw, and also to be funny). Under...

Because there are two rudders, and because they are angled out, to be maximally effective when the boat is heeled over, the steering linkage is rather intricate. Not counting the rudders and the wheel, there are 5 moving parts. The tie-rod and the aft whipstalk will be fabricated using 1-inch aluminum square stock, 1x¼" stainless steel strips and #10 stainless steel mechanical screws. The tillers will be made of 1.5" aluminum rod with flats milled into the ends at the right angles for attaching the stainless steel strips. The connections will be made using ¼" stainless steel bolts and Acetal washers. The entire assembly is intended to last for the life of the boat without any maintenance. One interesting feature of this linkage is that it makes it possible to switch between wheel steering and tillerpilot steering at the pedestal. The wheel can be disconnected from the steering linkage simply by pulling back on it, causing the pinion gear splined to its shaft to disco...

I haven't studied concrete to any great extent—up until now. It is ubiquitous, and is one of the most ancient and well-understood construction materials, right after mud brick and plaster. It has a bad reputation as a boatbuilding material because of all the failed ferrocement projects, but that's not concrete, that's cement plaster over wire mesh. I was planning to do something different: create a steel-reinforced concrete slab for the bottom. And so I delved into the details on engineering concrete slabs, and came up with an answer that didn't please me at all. Concrete has excellent compressive strength, and unreinforced concrete blocks can be stacked miles high before the bottom-most blocks gets crushed. But its strength under tension is more or less nonexistent, and to avoid placing it under tension ancient builders had a rule that the compressive force has to be concentrated within the middle third of a column. Modern builders work around this problem by making co...

This is a guest post from Ian Swan. As some of you know, I have sold my shoreside residence, and for more than a year now I have been living aboard and sailing up and down the east coast of the US. I have done this both as a lifestyle choice and as a way to minimize costs, including fuel costs, and to maximize the available options. For many of you, such a dramatic change of habits is out of the question. But this is not to say that you should neglect to look at boats as an important element of your post-collapse preparations. Ian's article takes this subject, which for most people resides in the realm of daydreams, and brings it down to the level of practical reality. Unlike many sailing experts that might try to impress you with their opinions, Ian knows his stuff, and, very importantly, he isn't trying to sell you anything. So if you are one of the many people who think that having a "just in case" boat might be a good idea, but have not acted on it,...

I. Y. Repin Barge Haulers on the Volga Long-time readers of this blog probably know that there are such things in the world as square boats, and that they tend to do all that intricately modeled boats do, better and for a lot less money, plus they have a host of other advantages. But such knowledge is rare, even among sailors. I speak from experience, having recently spent a fair amount of time working on a square boat—my old Hogfish, which I have sold, and which is hauled out in a boatyard, being readied for her next tour of duty in the Caribbean and then, via the Canal, the Pacific. As I worked, various types of boaty/yachty people would come up to me and ask me questions. The typical question was “What is this thing?” usually followed by a comment, such as “It looks really unusual.” Well, such boats were quite usual before, and I think that they will be usual once more. Their advantages are just too numerous. To start with, square, flat-bottom boats go aground reall...

The ways I have found to save money on this project are too numerous to list. Here are some of the highlights. Not using marine grade plywood and using exterior-grade AC plywood instead will save $13,000. Not using expensive veneers or solid hardwoods in the cabin paneling, and using painted plywood and plastic laminates for countertops and tabletops will save around $2000. Linoleum tile for the cabin sole will save a few thousand. Not using portlights but using deadlights covered over with lexan will save at least $3000. Using concrete for ballast saves a lot. Lead is around $15 per pound for wheel weights (a convenient form); concrete is $0.25 a pound. A 3" slab of concrete will weigh around 17,000 lbs, or $4250. The lead equivalent would have cost $255,000. Rigging There will be about 60 sheaves in a number of blocks for routing all the lines, over a dozen fairleads (rounded holes for feeding lines through without resistance or chafe. If purchased from a marine parts supplier, ...

Sooner or later most of us want to write stories about people who are or were special to us. These stories may be free-standing tributes, or you may include friends as characters in memoir stories. Some such stories work better than others. In fact, as much as I hate to say this, some can be downright boring, the exact opposite of what we intend. The boring stories are generally limited to an account of things you did together, which makes the story more about your experience than the friend. While it’s perfectly fine to write about shared experiences, it takes more to define a relationship. Use these tips to write glowing tributes that will help readers love your friends as much as you do. Give examples of what makes the person special to you. If you say only that “Joan was a wonderful friend,” we have no idea what that means. Tell us what Joan did that set her apart, how she went above and beyond. Did she have a special sense of humor that always lifted your spirits? Was she one of ...

Most sailboats have low topsides, making them look sleek and sexy. But then the deck ends up too low to walk under down below without having to stoop. To compensate, most of them have a silly little structure called a cabin-top, which is basically an elongated box to accommodate your head while you make your way through the cabin. Many designers streamline the shape of the cabin-top. This adds nothing to the aerodynamics of the hull, while making it more likely that somebody will slip and fall while stumbling around on a wet and slippery deck. The narrow little passageways on both sides of the cabin-top, called the side-decks, are often too narrow for two people to get past each other. On QUIDNON the topsides are high enough to provide 6 feet of headroom down below, and to keep most of the salt spray off the deck when sailing. There is no cabin-top because the deck is a flush deck—from one side of the boat all the way to the other. It is flat, not “whale-backed,” so that people can str...

This decodes to “Length overall is same as length on deck.” You see, boats spend a lot of time at marinas, and marinas charge by the foot, based on LOA. If your boat has a bowsprit sticking forward from the bow or dinghy davits hanging off the transom, then you are paying lots of money to rent space for a few sticks which don't do you any good at all while your boat is sitting there at the marina. I know some boats with huge, glorious bowsprits, complete with so-called “dolphin strikers,” protruding majestically (homoerotically?) from their bows. These boats have sat at the same marina for years, perhaps venturing out into the harbor for a day or so once or twice a season. I shudder to think what those silly sticks have cost their owners in slip fees. There is no reason for a bowsprit on a Junk-rigged boat, making that decision easy. As far as the dinghy davits, a better solution is dinghy forks. These are sticks that hide in deep sockets built into the hull and slide out when they...

About the most cost-effective and quick way of making a mast is to use a tapered aluminum flagpole. That is what I had on HOGFISH, and it worked just fine. There the mainmast was stepped in a tabernacle, and had 4 lower shrouds (fore and aft), 2 uppers (aft only) with no spreaders, a genoa stay which went to the end of the bowsprit and a staysl stay. Taking down the mainmast, and putting it back up, was always a bit of an adventure. Getting the mast up or down was pretty much the easy part; it was rigging and unrigging the gin pole, and detaching, coiling, reattaching and tuning the standing rigging that took all the time. Plus all that coiled wire rope cluttered up the deck when the mast was down. On QUIDNON, I intend to go with unstayed masts. The arrangement I have thought up is as follows. The tabernacle of each mast consists of a galvanized steel pipe with a bracket made of steel plate welded to the top of it. The bottom of the pipe rests in a cup cast into to the concrete bottom,...