self build catamaran kit

[Gabriela O.]

Hi everybody,

We want to build our own catamaran 42-46 with a self build kit. Does anyone of you have experience in that? Does anyone know a company that sales kits like this? We live in Germany.



Regards

[TrentePieds]

Are you thinking of something like the old Wharrams? Or what?

TrentePieds

[Gabriela O.]

more like a Lagoon or Leopard

[boatman61]

Doubt very much you will find many pre-fab kits, however there are designers who sell plans..
One pre-fab supplier..
https://www.graingerdesigns.net/buil...build-process/

[JoFi]

Max Cruise 42
https://maxcruisemarine.com/max42sc-sailing-catamaran/

[capt jgw]

Originally Posted by JoFi

Max Cruise 42
https://maxcruisemarine.com/max42sc-sailing-catamaran/

Check out MJ Sailing on YouTube. They're building one in Maryland (US). Hell of a lot of work.

[TrentePieds]

Gabriela said: "more like a Lagoon or Leopard"

I thot that's wot you'd say :-)

By all means, look around and see what you can find. Some notion of what you'd get involved in has already been given above.

But do be careful!

Unless you are a VERY experienced and a VERY harmonious couple, such a project is very likely indeed to destroy more than your bank account!

If you want to go sailing, why not do the sensible thing and buy a "ready to go" boat? Perhaps at a deep, deep discount from a seller who want's nothing more than to get out from under his white elephant! Perhaps buy it in a place where the coconuts grow.

If you want to build a boat, and you don't care about sailing, get a job in a boat factory. It's nasty, tedious work, and it doesn't pay enough to keep body and soul together in any kind of reasonable way.

Remember that while the romantic dream of cruising is nice - as long as you are warm and dry - the MAJORITY of people, and particularly the majority of WOMEN, find that when they try it, it isn't really how they want to spend their lives. That's not a sexist comment. It's a statement of observable and observed fact!

Be careful also that you don't misjudge the joys of living aboard. You can buy a modest house for less than you would pay for a fancy Catamaran, Houses (and condos) APPRECIATE in value due to population pressure everywhere in the world. Yachts DEPRECIATE at a horrendous rate, and if a worldwide recession and inflation (a la Germany ca. 1923), as I think it may well do, your boat, let alone an unfinished project, would be scuppered well and truly. Even if we dodge that particular bullet, amatoor built boats can be EXTREMELY difficult to sell. Keeping a boat is horrendously expensive and the cost goes up as an exponential function of boat length.

In days of yore when people discovered that boats built of cement would actually float - yes, they do - people in their innocence went piling on. I've seen on or two good "LaFarge Barges". But there were DOZENS of 'em abandoned on the banks of the Mighty Muddy Fraser River because in their enthusiasm people had bought a pig-in-a-poke. Yes, cement is cheaper than "frozen snot" - fibreglass - but the cost of the bare hull of a boat, in the size you are no doubt contemplating, is only 5 or 10 percent of the total cost of the boat ready to put to sea.

Like I said: BE CAREFUL! :-)

Viel Glück :-)

TrentePieds

[catsketcher]

Myself and more than a few friends built our own cats. I loved the process and I liked the camaraderie that we had.

We did it because back in the 90s you couldn't get nice performance cats with updated things like walk through transoms and easy to enter hulls, or forward vision from the briodgedeck cabin. And we could make them fast, much faster than any production cat (still is pretty fast today).

But building a cat to make a Lagoon doesn't make sense to me. If you want to build because it is a bucket list thing - do it, but copying what you can already get for less money and no time involved doesn't seem logical. That said, you really have to want to build a boat. I spent 3 months working for one of Australia's best boatbuilders for no wages, just to learn how (I was bumming around at the time). Are you that desperate?

If you have to build a boat, the nagging won't go away, then ditch the Lagoon and get someone like Chris White or Robin Chamberlin or Schionning to make you a computer cut kit or a design they help you select. Get a custom one.

cheers

Phil

cheers

Phil

[Tin Tin]

Check out the Fusion kit
Fusion Kit Catamarans

[Fore and Aft]

Gabriela O have you built something smaller first like a dinghy? You may find just building the dinghy a tedious boring process and not your thing. We built our own house and I wished I had built the garage first. I would never have built our house if I had known had boring and tedious it was going to be.
As a marine surveyor I could tell you countless stories about owner built boats that are never finished or badly finished. There are the exceptions but those are the rare ones. A kit boat still needs a level of competence and skill to finish. Nothing that cannot be learned but that just increases the build time.
The wife and I built a 32 foot yacht part time in 18 months. I am a professional boat builder and the wife had plenty of boat building experience before we started.
Cheers