Changing Horses

There has not been a lot of work done on the boat for a while, mainly because I've had a change of heart as to the construction method and material to build the boat. I built Rattle and Hum out of plywood and epoxy and am very familiar and confident with this building method. I felt plywood would be acceptable material for this boat.

Since building Rattle and Hum, I considered other methods of boat building but they all looked too expensive and I did not have experience with the material. One material that caught my interest was foam for a core and polyester resin and fiberglass cloth for the skins. Most production boats are built with this material so there must be something going for it.

The commercial boat building industry uses female or male molds to shape their hulls and I could not see myself spending all that time and effort to build molds for one boat.

I had heard of Kellsal's KSS method of hull building but did not understand it so basically dismissed it as a possible technique for my project. One of my boat building friends mentioned KSS again and suggested I check into it more closely. I bought a DVD from Derek Kellsal and was fascinated with what they were doing. The DVD was of one of his workshops where they built half a catamaran hull in one day! ONE DAY! That had to be a misprint or something. You can not build half a catamaran hull in one day.

I started to explore this KSS thing to see if it was hype or what. The more I studied KSS the more I was convinced I could do this. I still was not sure about everything I read, but the concept looked doable. The only way to be sure was to attend one of Derek's workshops and see for my self. Steve and Larisa Becker are building a 42 foot Kellsal and were having a workshop at their shop in Tennessee near Knoxville in October so I decided to attend and see what this was all about. Go to http://www.ksstennesseeworkshop2010.com/photos to see the photos of the workshop. Click on user galleries to see all the albums.

Well, we did it. We built half a 42 foot catamaran hull in 15 hours. It took another 8 hours the next day to shape the bottom of the hull so all up 25 hours. Of course Steve and Larisa had done a lot of prep work so that when we arrived, it was full steam ahead on the building of the hull. Nevertheless, if the other half took another 25 hours and maybe another 10 hours to join the two halves together, 60 hours to build one hull is unbelievable.

OK, back to reality. The 15 hours to build the half hull is really 15 X 7 people = 105 hours if you are doing this yourself and the 8 hours of shaping is 8 X 7 people = 56 hours. Still, 161 hours of effort to produce one half of a 42 foot hull is amazing. So, let's see 161 hours for one half, plus 161 for the second half and say 80 hours to join the two halves together is 402 hours. Now a lot of the people there were not always busy and there was a lot of gabbing going on, about how this works and how that works so I would estimate one person working along could build one hull in 200 hours.

Of course the hulls are not the whole boat and there is a lot of structure to be built after the hulls are complete but in my boat, the hulls are the major component of the boat as there is no center accommodations to consider. This could save me a couple of years of build time