one of the quickest ways to ruin the way an established boat plan 'swims' is by adding a tall rig after de-masting.
it's extremely enticing to 'add more sail' to a boat in order to squeeze more speed out of it, or achieve easier lufting.
turns out that marine architecture is a lot harder than one thinks at first glance, and just about everyone that tries to tweak specs afterwards does so in such a way that makes the boat categorically worse.
(don't ask me how I came to realize this after many dollars spent)
the joke is, "the 2nd best day of your life is the day you buy your boat" which makes the listener think "2nd? oh, must be after your wedding/birth of child"
and then you say "the 1st best day is when you sell it"
Yeah, I seem to remember the full phrase is something like, “Advice for millionaires: if it floats, flies, or [fornicates], rent it.” Advice does not apply to billionaires, which is a category Mike Lynch may have snuck into depending on whose reporting you believe.
As distasteful as the last part of that advice it, I can see the sense of the rest of it. You need to have enough money that the inevitably high ongoing maintenance costs (and I guess depreciation) simply aren’t a concern, or even something you have to think about because you have people to take care of it for you.
Bottom paint is about $250/gal. It takes us about half a day to sand the hull and roll on a layer. My 40' sailboat can be covered with 1 generous coat with 1gal with a little left over. $7k for bottom paint must either be a huge boat, an expensive crew, or both. It's just not all that expensive if you're willing to put in a little effort.
I’m no boat expert but doesn’t your statement imply some level of ease of dragging a boat out of the water to perform this operation? Something tells me that pulling a 40 foot sailboat out of the water, turning it over, painting it, and returning it into the water isn’t necessarily the most straightforward operation. A lot of complexity is probably loaded into “it takes us” and if we took a gander at the hourly rates of everyone involved in said operation as well as the upfront cost of the equipment to perform said operation as well as the safety measures required to execute the operation properly I feel like we would be a lot closer to the $7k number than the $250 number
You just take the boat to the travel lift and it hoists out pretty easy.
Under 1 or 2 boat bucks for in/out lift, dry storage, and paint if you DIY is reasonable for smaller vessels, like under 30’.
The tough part is scheduling and finding a boatyard if there’s not one close.
If you don't enjoy working on boats owning one sure would get expensive. I guess I'm lucky in that I don't have to pretend? Sure beats office politics, I wish it paid nearly as well as computers.
This can be done for free by just beaching the boat and working during low tide. Although that can be illegal nowadays in some places. Plus a 40 foot boat is much larger than required for cruising anywhere you want- if your boat fits on a trailer it is not only easy to paint, but probably can get by without any.
I didn't factor in haul out and storage because that's a separate thing from bottom paint. Haul out and transport costs about $1k/yr and storage cost over the winter is a further $1k.
Hourly labor rates are $0, I share ownership with 2 other people and we all pitch in.
If you're an engineer, I'm just going to x3 to x10 that time estimate to come to something realistic, just like I do with the engineers at work.
That way it includes going to buy the paint and sandpaper, putting the boat in a drydock or otherwise on land, finding and dragging out the tools and getting power to them, drying the boat, cleaning it, eating, toilet breaks, taping off the edges etc, letting the paint dry, cleaning up everything afterwards, putting the boat back into the water and probably tons more that I missed.
It depends. For example, if the previous paint contains environmentally harmful compounds, you can not sand it without the infrastructure to collect the dust. The details depend on the location (regulation), but typically you need to hire this out.
Sanding takes multiple person-days and can be the wrong method (depending on details). Media blasting (like soda) is much preferred but requires machines and infrastructure to collect the run-off. In ideal situations, sanding is not necessary at all.
It can be several boat bucks, or just about a hundred dollars. It depends.
It does contain harmful compounds. It wouldn't work to prevent growth otherwise. You use a random orbit sander hooked up to a shop vac just like when you sand anything else (unless you prefer dust going everywhere).
For a 40' sailboat it doesn't take multiple person days, it takes about a quarter of a person day. More if you really have to take off a lot of layered up material. And you're right, blasting would work better in that case.
> It does contain harmful compounds. It wouldn't work to prevent growth otherwise.
Nowadays there exists bottom paints such as polysiloxane based ones that work by creating a very hard and smooth surface that critters find it very hard to attach to, rather than poisoning them.
There are levels of toxicity. For some old paints, allowing the dust or run-off from pressure washing to touch the ground would be violating some regulation. Removing those old paints is more complicated. They need to be removed completely and cleanly, so sanding is a bad choice.
This isn't the case for any paint now purchasable, but most still contain biocides that you want to avoid for your own health when cleaning or sanding.
7k$ is about what yards quoted for such a job in NorCal. It's easy to DIY if you know what to do, but (1) it's a nasty job (2) it's toxic (3) it takes time and (4) you still end up paying about 2k$ if you're thrifty (in NorCal). I both hired and DIYd the job and it's a wash as to whether one prevails over the other. If I were doing nothing else but boating fulltime, I'd DIY it. But I have a job and family.
Hi, 45' boat owner here. Steps are pull the boat out by travel lift and block it. Power wash the bottom. Put up dust barrier. Don tyvek suit and mask. Sand with dust hose. Power wash the bottom. Paint first coat. Dry. Paint Second coat. Dry. Lift boat move blocking pads. Paint pad area. Dry. Paint Second coat. Dry. Launch boat by travel lift. Paint is $320 per gallon I need 2 gallons and a quart. Total time is 2 days if they hustle, 3 if the pull is late in the day. Lucky for me, they have not found blisters or any thing that takes fiberglass work, that adds time.
Last time I had it done it was $6450 including tax. 7 boat bucks.
Your process, while undeniably more correct than mine, is substantially more involved. Mine goes like this:
1. In the fall, drive the boat onto the hauler's trailer, unstep the masts, and transport it to the yard. Place on blocks and pressure wash.
2. Winterize the boat, wait for spring.
3. In the spring, break out the shop vac and sander and sand the hull. Since it's a multi season ablative paint, don't sand it all off--just enough to smooth it out and get the dried, hard top layer off.
4. Roll on a coat of paint.
5. When the truck arrives to splash the boat, slap some paint on the spots where the stands' pads were, and where the blocks were under the keel.
6. Step and rig the masts.
7. Splash the boat and go sailing.
Steps 3-7 take place on two consecutive days, along with a bunch of other maintenance activities.
I find sailing to be a fun low cost, sometimes even slightly profitable hobby… I own a very small (17 foot) cruising sailboat I maintain myself and get endless fun for less than the average teenager spends on a cell phone. It has an even smaller sailing dinghy/tender I built myself from old redwood fence planks. It would be the last thing I would sell even if destitute- because although small I could live on it for free, and can also use it to get fresh seafood for free- not to mention traveling without fuel!
(to paraphrase Sterling Hayden) my body is only about 6ft long… I sleep as well and have just as much fun on a 17 foot boat as I would on a 184ft boat- and despite being small mine is much more seaworthy than Bayesian was.
This is true in many things. Most car mods make the car objectively worse unless you really need the niche thing the mod does - and even if you think you do, be really sure.
I'm a full-time RVer and see this all the time with diesel trucks. The trucks get "deleted" and modded for more power and to disable the DEF system. Almost everyone I've known throughout the years begins having transmission trouble within months, especially after heavy load. A few swear by it. I've got a very expensive Cummins and I'm hellbent to leave it stock (and under warranty).
the issue isnt that they disabled their DEF system or deleted their DPF or EGR, it's that they probably installed new ECUs or flashed new fuel maps or something and boosted the power beyond the torque abilities of the transmission attached. In a lot of diesel RVs the transmissions are normally good to 2,000lb-ft, but the engines can be pushed beyond that pretty easily.
My truck owning friends like to blow through transmissions at 50-60K miles by driving their trucks like sports cars and aggressively short shifting while on power. None of them do “truck things” so it’s always a head scratcher as to why they continue to do this.
AFAIU modern diesels have lower combustion temperatures in order to limit NOx formation. I imagine this comes at a cost in thermodynamic efficiency.
Similarly particle filters, catalytic converters and whatnot reduce efficiency via exhaust backpressure.
So all in all, reducing non-CO2 emissions do come at a cost in CO2 emissions (or fuel consumed, if you like). Is it as much as 15%? No idea.. And is it all worth it? I'd argue yes, old-school diesel exhaust is nasty stuff.
Yes, this is the exact trade from Dieselgate, as well - higher combustion temperatures increase efficiency, reducing CO2 output, but at the expense of much higher NOx production. It’s easily 15% or more.
Exhaust back pressure is not an issue at all on diesels because they all run big turbos.
As for your later point...I very much concur. I started masking (n95) during the pandemic, and haven't stopped. I have a... large number of health issues including several respiratory ones. Exhaust in general really is nasty stuff. I live in pretty quiet smallish (100k) town, and it can be bad enough around here with all the pollen, but I wasnt recently on a whirlwind trip through the north east that saw me visit the dense urban cores of DC, Philly, Manhattan, and Boston. The difference in odor on the occasions I'd take my mask off on the sidewalk were kinda shocking as someone not used to it.
Out of curiosity do you live in the Great Lakes basin? I moved from Indiana to the West Coast, and I am always shocked at how bad the air quality is when I go back, even in rural areas. During wild fire season I monitor AQI, and when I zoom out I always see that Indiana is just as bad as the smokiest days on the West Coast.
Something about the large, hardly noticeable depression traps bad air at a regional level. I wouldn’t move back for a myriad of reasons, but everyone is always surprised when I list air quality as one.
Similar migration (IN->CA), it has changed my life. I had the worst sinus/migraine issues growing up and my breathing has dramatically improved after moving out of Midwest, even compared on the worst wildfire weeks out here.
Coming from NWI, I know the mills had a lot to do with subpar air quality, but I had similar issues when I lived on the far Northside of Chicago so it seems to be more regionally affecting.
It's a similar top reason on my list to not living there long term again
North Carolina. Locally it's not so much exhaust type stuff, but all the damn pollen, which I'm somewhat allergic too. Pine trees for miles. I'm about 50 miles inland from the coast so lots of wetlands so in the summer (Which means basically... late March through mid October - it's going to hit 82 here toomorrow) it's oppressively hot and humid.
> Exhaust back pressure is not an issue at all on diesels because they all run big turbos.
Not sure what you're arguing here. Isn't it quite obvious that resistance in the exhaust system means that the engine has to do more work to push the exhaust gases out; work that otherwise could be used to turn the crankshaft. Now of course a lot of that extra energy is wasted in any case, particularly if there's nothing like a turbocharger to make use of it.
Practically all diesels have turbos. You have literally have to go back to tiny tractor engines form
The 60s to
Find ones that aren’t. Turbos already provide a ton of back pressure. What’s downstream of that is pretty irrelevant
My tractor from the early 00s doesn't have a turbo. Plenty of VW and Mercedes Benz cars built in the 80s and 90s don't have turbos.
Backpressure aft of the turbo is something you really want to avoid because it makes the turbine much less effective. The whole point is to use a pressure and thermal gradient to do work.
I was under the impression the engine had to be run hotter in order to break down the NOx particulates in the exhaust gas recirculation scheme which led to higher fuel burn.
hmmm interesting. In a gasoline engine with high temperatures, NOx is produced, but it is fixed by the catalytic converter. So I guess that's not possible with a diesel, so they have to lower temperatures. That must lower the efficiency of the engine because (I think) the temperature difference governs efficiency.
Currently only smaller engines are EGR+DPF only. It takes having an SCR(&DEF) system to reduce emissions to legal limits on most larger engines now and the technology has been combined to have an engine with EGR+DPF&SCR(&DEF).
There are issues with engines and the active regeneration that has to occur in order to clean the DPF(basically engine has to get very hot and burn out the buildup) and also issues with DEF, which is an ammonia solution, both with the electronic dosing units failing and solution purity.
I’m curious how combustion temperatures are lowered like you say - is it a pv=nrt relationship hinging on changes in compression ratio or something like injector technology?
Yes, the latest generation diesel engines have lower compression ration than engines from a couple decades ago. Maybe something like 16:1 instead of 19:1. But also exhaust gas recirculation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaust_gas_recirculation
The U.S. diesel tuning crowd seemingly never discuss air/fuel ratios. This is a huge mistake. Also it's important to understand how much torque your transmission is rated for and to not stray beyond it. It's possible to reliably extract more performance than the manufacturer supplied but you have to understand what you're getting into. Turning it up to 11 and "rolling coal" is gonna get expensive, and it's super dumb.
Really depends on which crowd you're talking about.
The "I bought a tuner" or "I bought a kit" guys don't care or know enough to care.
Once you start talking about people who are reading turbo specs and whatnot people do very much care (because turbos and injectors are expensive and you want them both to be compatible so they get the most out of each other).
I disagree the diesel crowd doesn’t discuss air/fuel ratios but perhaps I’m misunderstanding something. Sizes and types of turbos, fuel pumps, injector nozzles are frequently discussed.
I do agree rolling coal is dumb but most/many daily diesel drivers don’t like it either, have always seen it as kind of a high school thing.
Maybe they've wisened up more recently but I've never seen an AFR gauge in a tuned diesel in the U.S., however they're as common as EGT and boost pressure monitoring elsewhere.
You can infer the same information it would get you via boost and EGT and whether or not your exhaust visually indicates unburnt fuel. You also don't need super precise AFR in a diesel like you do a high strung turbo gas engine.
Wide band O2 sensors are unreliably enough that they're kind of a pain to keep working accurately long term if you're not on a racecar maintenance schedule and if you aren't tuning things to those extremes you don't need that level of precision anyway.
Basically it just kinda adds up to "not worth it" for street vehicles
Those people are outnumbered 100:1 by people who simply deleted their trucks when the relevant parts gave them problem and kept the power at stock levels. Those people don't have a reason to brag anything like the "muh 100hp tune" people do so you don't hear about them.
In my final high school years, my parents gifted me a 1980 Corolla, and it became my experimental electronics lab for a while.
I installed a pull-out stereo, a separate amplifier, various permanent and movable speakers, etc. I mostly had the pros installed them, but I was always tweaking things at the wire-harness level. I enjoyed my music EXTRA LOUD, with minimal distortion.
And I had one of those basic aftermarket alarm systems. And there I was, constantly tripping the alarm for various reasons, and we lived in a safe neighborhood, so it was mostly an additional annoyance when I set it off, or armed it, or disarmed it: I was being super ostentatious.
So my proudest DIY mod was to install a shiny toggle switch in the dashboard. The toggle switch had the sole function of disabling the alarm by cutting its power. So I basically handed it to the crooks who came along in a few weeks to steal all my cassettes. But honestly, I doubt that anyone on that block was sorry to see me separated from my music at that point.
Most mods in recent cars seem to just undo some of the regulatory emissions controls in exchange for a bit of performance. Engines aren’t leaving much on the table nowadays. CPU overlocking is going the same way.
It depends on the mod. Some mods are easily an improvement; new tires are probably a good example here, because automakers frequently install crappy tires at the factory because of some sort of deal with the tire company, and worse, replacement for that same model of tire end up being much more expensive than better tires in the same size, probably because many consumers mistakenly think they need the exact same tire.
But yeah, most "enthusiast" mods are a waste of money and make the vehicle worse.
I've been sailing on a 13 meter long boat in 40 knot winds, and that mast looks to have more area than the total sail we had up. The moment the wind imparts on such a tall mast must be massive.
Eh, there's some nuance there; the shipbuilder claims they didn't properly prepare and the crew say they did prepare. The limited evidence so far seems to side with the crew.
Old wooden sailing ships had masts that were somewhat retractable in that the upper spars could be removed and taken down on deck. But this isn't really practical with modern aluminum or carbon fiber masts. And it would complicate the rigging.
People have been successfully modifying vessels to better fit their uses for thousands and thousands of years. This wasn't even modified after delivery. It was built to order this way by the OEM. Everything has tradeoffs. Sometimes people go too far or choose the wrong attributes. You're making a mountain out of a mole hill.
People have not been making vessels with 237ft masts for thousands of years. That boat literally had one of the tallest mast ever to exist on a boat. You combine the “extreme” nature of this boat with an extreme weather event and you get an extremely outlier outcome
Materials science has advanced quite a bit since the Preussen though. Aluminum, or even carbon fiber masts, rod standing rigging, Dyneema (UHMWPE) ropes, etc., all add up and drastically reduces weight.
Not saying the Bayesian design was or wasn't insane, I don't know, but my point is that it shouldn't be judged compared to what was done over 100 years ago.
Yes, the yacht is a much smaller ship but it has half as many masts it's masts are aluminum, it has engines so it doesn't have to run sail in poor conditions to maintain control authority and benefits from 150yr of improvements to watertightness.
I get that everyone wants to act smug because "everybody knows that you don't put big weight high up, hehehe, stupid billionares" but I'm betting that when the dust settles, the circle jerking dies down and the reports get published the end result will be the mast being a contributory factor (I'm betting on the reduction in righting moment rather than wind area) at best and that the outcome would not have been that much more unavoidable had the same other currently unknown errors been made on the other ships of the class.
A modern ship in good state doesn't just sink in minutes from capsizing. Other stuff had to have gone wrong here too. These vessels are designed that you can spend all day burying the bow in wave after wave. A little dip of one gunnel into the water should not be catastrophic. TFA discusses this.
Having a home designed (previous owner) world sailing vessel with a mast that is bigger then the original designer's spec. It made it around cape horn and has seen a lot of high latitude low atmospheric pressure no problem.
I've heard it argued that a longer mast makes the boat more stable like a tightrope walker with a pole.
Not GP or mech eng, but I suspect something similar to the following:
Sail area ~square mast height
Mast wind force under sail ~linear sail area
Mast diameter ~square mast wind force under sail
Mast wind force reefed ~linear mast diameter
If that's right, then you're in quadratic shit. How much bigger was the mast, a metre taller or - like the Bayesian - tens of metres?
it's extremely enticing to 'add more sail' to a boat in order to squeeze more speed out of it, or achieve easier lufting.
turns out that marine architecture is a lot harder than one thinks at first glance, and just about everyone that tries to tweak specs afterwards does so in such a way that makes the boat categorically worse.
(don't ask me how I came to realize this after many dollars spent)