The price of plans has to go up.  It looks like the magic date is June 1. I’m thinking it has been about 20 years since the plans prices were raised. I have been told my plans prices are low; and it has become more work then the cash flow reflects.

We are a bit closer to sorting that out. It seems the shopping cart cannot tolerate no shipping charge. Waiting for answers but for now, again the best work-around seems to be order a book, tell the cart bot that you live in Botswana, and email me the study set you actually want emailed to you.

A nice shot of James’ plywood box beam bowtube end. A composite chainplate.

Unit #2 of the Lake Victoria catamaran ferries is waiting patiently. The lee side looks like it needs a bath. I hope they get it cleaned up and going soon.

John here on the west coast of Canada has some cost figures for various core approaches to his 40 trimaran.

“I just got a quote for cedar strip 1/2″ x 11/2” for a $1,05/ lin ft…that $8/sq.ft.

Resin $317.60 – 5gal pail

hardener $142.41 – 1gal”

Delightful meeting with Dan. Turns out a wave stove in the door in the front and it all went downhill from there. I do stand corrected about it having too much windage for offshore;  it was never intended to go offshore.  Except when it did.

Dan thinks he might rebuild, but ship it home in bits safe in a container. It would need accurate 3D modeling to sort out the pieces then. Glad to meet Dan.

I just got word yesterday that this 61′ Kelsall powercat Twin Coves sank and was lost at sea.  I see no mention of it online.  I will know a lot more after a meeting tomorrow. I would not have felt safe going out of the harbor with that much windage on a sled that small.   I always declare that whatever the sea can’t hit, it can’t hurt.  The inverse that it will hurt what it can hit is true too.  I feel badly for the owner.

Larry brought this site to my attention. Carbon here.
http://www.reusemarketplace.org/?content=ad.view.all.contact;listing_id=421720

I have realized lately that there was a kind of unusual and I think singular conjunction going on in Seattle in the late 80s. Naval architecture had just started to go digital. It was new and expensive. Macsurf had just come out and I seem to recall it was $6K a seat. Autocad was $3K a seat. A giant HP pen plotter was $10K.   What did a Mac cost?  Going from memory here.
Suddenly, here in Seattle there was an explosion of innovation. I always thought that was going on everywhere else, but now I’m not so sure.

Microsoft helped make the PC a less costly alternative to Mac.  Dave Vacanti here wrote Prolines hull design software for PC that did Macsurf at 10% the cost.  Generic Cadd, also here,  for PC was one step behind Autocad, also at 10% of the cost.  Zericon did a pen plotter for $2.5K.  The guy at plotter accelerator wrote a batchfile that made the Zericon plot in one smooth sweep instead of in the order drawn.  Generic also output a flavor of EPS file that Adobe (also down the street) could read easily and with even now, unmatched resolution.  So we could all start doing high quality publishing.  And all these people knew each other.  Dave wrote output specifically for Generic and so on.  By ’86 or ’87 I was doing everything in CADD, with files downstreaming from Prolines to Generic.  I recall being at a design conference in Southampton in maybe ’88 or ’89.  I presented slides of this process and the designs.  John Shuttleworth, the then famous as the most digital catamaran designer in the world, told me, “How you do that is great.  We can’t do that.”

The only other person I recall seeing do CADD back then was Gino.  I was watching him playing with it back at R&D Boatworks.  Cam Lewis was there also.  His comment was, “Its like an etch a sketch”

Nice new video from Brian out cruising Cat 2 Fold. http://cat2fold.wordpress.com/2014/03/28/charette-family-adventure-2013/