Boat Building Costs

[Boracay]

sw8fbar,
Can you afford 20,000 hours of skilled local labor, the materials and the machinery?

Do you know enough to supervise a major project?

Do you have the space?

A good weld in stainless or a nice laminate requires the same attitude as good painting or wood carving.

The techniques of boat building are not difficult. What is difficult is making it all look good.

If you can find 5 top craftpersons they could build you a beautiful boat in two years.

[44'cruisingcat]

20,000 hours? That's pretty high, even for a Farrier. Seriously, you should be able to get a mid 40's foot cat built to a very nice standard in well under half that number of hours, even with unskilled labour.

[BigCat]

I'm building my own boat, and I designed it, too. My design is meant to be easy to build. Some other designs are meant to be beautiful, and are probably not so easy to build. In general, the more a boat looks like a shoebox, the easier it is going to be to build. Kelsall, Woods, (hard chine Woods, that is,) Wharram, Oram, etc. design boats to be easy to build, therefore faster and cheaper to build. I wouldn't say that of Farrier or Schionning. If you have a place to build, understand and love the details of everything that goes into boats, and are either good with your hands or good at administering a manufacturing business, building your own boat is feasible. By this I mean, you need to be able to participate with knowledge and pleasure in the discussion of, say, the merits of keyways versus set screws in the installation of prop shafts.

If you are a novice, you should know that custom built boats are the most expensive possible option. As the expert said after presenting a bill for $100 for 10 minutes work, '$5 for the 10 minutes work, and $95 for knowing how.'

As for boat building as a business, I have certainly seen many, many fine boatbuilders go out of business through the years. As an aside, I have read that India is the worst place in the world to start a business, because the government regulations and bureaucrats are the most obstructionistic in the world.

[Evan]

It's not cheap.

We bought a neglected Richard Woods 40' open bridgedeck catamaran for $60,000 CDN.

We have put a diesel with feathering prop in it, a new carbon fiber mast beam, built a bridgedeck cabin. Fully outfitted (spectra watermaker, ham radio, radar, dinghy with 15 HP outboard) our final cost will be close to $130,000 CDN (about the same as US$ now).

I'm a very good scrounger/Ebay purchaser, buy a lot of stuff wholesale, and did virtually all my own work on the bridgedeck cabin. Building your own boat is a very expensive undertaking, even with cheap labour. It also takes many thousands of hours and should not be undertaken lightly.

Time:
I started work in February 2005 (prefabricating fiberglass panels for the bridgedeck cabin). I worked about 1-1/2 days / week on this all that spring.

July 2005, hauled the boat and cut the middle part out with a chainsaw and installed the bridgedeck cabin and new mast beam and diesel.

Since that time I have spent about 15 hrs/week x 52 weeks / yr x 3 year = 2340 hours? That's a bit of a WAG but it's in the rough ballpark. THIS IS STARTING WITH A BOAT WITH HULLS AND A MOSTLY COMPLETE INTERIOR ALREADY....

I admit I don't always take the easy way out (fabricating buss bars or exotic carbon fiber chainplates or fittings), but still that's a lot of hours. A 40' catamaran is a very big undertaking in terms of labour hours.

[sw8fbar]

Originally Posted by sandy daugherty

Ajay: Its only a question of time before some VERY adventurous Venture Capitalist takes a shot at starting a boating industry in India. There will be two major hurdles: temperature and humidity. Most composite materials are designed for temperate conditions, and probably would have to be reformulated for optimum strength in your climate. Anther problem, which may be resolving itself, is that there has not been much of a market for these 'rich man's toys' but it appears that you and thousands of other young, well educated Indians are becoming a significant segment of the population with disposable income and time for recreational pursuits. So I think it will happen.

Start a sailing club!

Sandy : Wouldn't we have the same problem on the coastal area in Thailand, Northern Australia, South Africa or even Peru? The climate should be just about the same in Calcutta which is just below the Tropic of Cancer. If they are building boats there, I'd assume the formulations are already in vogue. The point that you make about the growing affluency is quite correct, we do have an ever increasing list of millionaires which are in fact splurging on these 'Toys' . They even organized our first boat show in Mumbai last year (..or the one before that.. I forget) - which brings me to think it would be a good time to start off building boats in India.... if only I had a few hundred thousand dollars

sw8fbar,
Can you afford 20,000 hours of skilled local labor, the materials and the machinery?

Do you know enough to supervise a major project?

Do you have the space?

A good weld in stainless or a nice laminate requires the same attitude as good painting or wood carving.

The techniques of boat building are not difficult. What is difficult is making it all look good.

If you can find 5 top craftpersons they could build you a beautiful boat in two years.

The Farrier site "warned" me of about 10000 hours which I was ok with at the labour costs here - if I could train them by building something smaller. I still do not have a BOM to find out what the material would cost me but I guess it should be about 33% of the total cost (read I don't have a clue ).

Space we have aplenty, the whole coast is virgin territory sans a few ports. I could probably rent our something near the river in Kolkata for a steal.

Given that I'm a project manager, my experience does equip me with the neccessary skills to manage an undertaking of this magnitude (software projects are more expensive and have more stakeholders than one can imagine. I'd rather not speak about the requirement stability ), but yes I don't know a thing about boat building.

I'm good with my hands too and have a knack for creating. I built my first Radio Airplane from scratch (a simple Plastic model, wingspan around 6 ft) - from concept to realization in a month's free time and I didn't have prior experience. But then building a boat this size is a different proposition isn't it?

-Ajay

[44'cruisingcat]

Humidity is a problem for boatbuilding in all of these tropical and subtropical areas. But there is a simple answer - airconditioning. AC is very effective in lowering humidity.

10,000 hours for an F41???? While they are a nice boat, I'd build something else. That's far too long to spend building a 41 footer.

[Boracay]

My experience of boatbuilding is that a lot of time needs to be spent working things out.

This is happening much more as I fit out Boracay. The other two boats that I built were smaller and way less complicated.

It really is the same as building a model aeroplane. It's just that the plans might lack a few details. And it's not as much fun to "wing" it.

And it takes way longer.