It must have been a couple of decades or more ago the Canadian beach cat builder Mystere retained me to design them a Formula 40 catamaran. It was built but never completed.
I just got these pictures from the fellow who may be reviving it.
It looks like carbon beam tubes which is very nice.
A basket of thoughts on submitting plans the USCG MSC in 2017.
A fellow who was quite informed about other catamaran designers told me that John Marples has given up on dealing with the USCG submittals. He also thought that Gold Coast had not had a new submittal since Ganulin retired. On the othe side, Schooner Creek thought the whole process went fine on a new submittal.
As I have noted, I am very wary of the new “kids” there and, as I found out last spring, anything that we had as settled regulations for the last two decades could be over. Which leads me to my next thought.
Building departments charge a lot of money for plans submittals. The USCG MSC charges nothing. I imagine that as soon as Trump realizes that some part of the government is doing something for nothing, that will change.
If any of you are thinking of having me do a new plans submittal to the USCG, I urge you to do it now.
The KHSD 42′ daycharter catamaran operating out of Key West, Blu Q, suffered a total bow truss failure. I call it a bow truss instead of bow tube because it was built as a Gold Coast style unit out of timber. I expect that the GC units had pin ends.
It did have more than 25 years of service in it. And rot was involved. The take away lesson is that it had fixed ends instead of pin ends. I’m sure the repeated stress started a crack and water got in. It is being replaced by a standard aluminum mast section bowtube.
Has to be another Palmer Johnson. Not sure why they even bothered adding the amas. It is still a huge fuel guzzling megayacht. It must be some kind of cultural change when vestigal amas are added to megayachts as style points.
As an aside, Andre Cocquyt is presenting the 32′ KHSD power tri at the PBB Refit Show in Ft. Lauderdale later this January 26 and 27. https://refitshow.com/
It looks like it could be one. And its not out the question that a kid with 3D CADD experience, but no sea miles, would offer a catamaran like this.
I got the paper pretty well updated and pushed into the digital medium. Double click on the “wingmast17f ” below.
Back in 1994 I had an idea that if you took the shear web out of a wing mast, and added that material to the sides, you would have better section properties, and a stiffer wing mast, with no increase in weight. And the panel aspect ratios would be closer to 1:1 so stronger actually.
In fact few alum masts have shear webs, but everybody forgets that.
First of all, I built two nearly identical wing masts; one with shear web and the other with the half of each shear web glued to each side . Then I load tested them. The improvement was remarkable.
Next I had Paul Steinert PE run a finite element study of the idea. The results were so good that we wrote a technical paper together on it. The paper was given and published at the 1994 MACM marine composites conference.
The paper had some difficulty later getting online however. Word5 for DOS had a great equation writing feature. The file would however completely lock up any later windows version of word. Also, the images were slides of photos of the computer screen. Those took some work to get digital. Meanwhile I got busy and neglected that paper. Recently I have realized that nobody has any idea what I am talking about without this paper being able to be online. So, along with everthing else, I will get it into InDesign and make it available.
Meanwhile here are some of the graphics that will be in it.
I got to see three of my overloaded ferry cats there. I had no idea that they would put more than 200 people on them.
The next ones will be honest 85′ ones to carry the weight. I just noticed that the shed behind makes it hard to discern the outline.
January 16-18, 2017. Tampa, FL.
http://www.electricandhybridmarineworldexpo.com/
No cost if you sign up online in advance.
I’m not going this year, but it looks interesting. I probably have a couple of cats there.
The big topic this year is battery safety.
On my recent trip to Belize I got to visit Tino’s boatyard. The mold is for a stretched version of my 65 powercat. the tables in the foreground are the flat bagging table. They do infusion there also.
