45ft sailing Yacht for £1200 on ebay anyone?

greenalien said:
...it also means that you would be unlikely to be able to recoup any money you spent on it, and would later find it hard to sell on - and £1500 a year in yard bills could end up as quite a significant financial millstone.
The other problem is that you'd be crazy to take something like this on without an expert hull survey, I guess that would cost a lot as well - it's very difficult for a layman to judge the quality of a ferro hull.
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This is wisdom of a sort. For some reason criticism of ferro boats always comes out sounding more damning than most.

Just about any boat of any type or material there is, the most likely event is you will recoup less money than you spent. So what. If you can't get used to that, don't go into boat ownership.

If you bought this boat, had second thoughts and broke it up and threw the concrete into a recycling depot, you would lose £1200, no more. Not much on a 45ft yacht. Why Haydude says it is no yacht, I cannot metre, err, fathom. If he means the GP14 is not a yacht, I apologise.

The need for an expert hull survey applies to all materials, ferro no more than any other.

I take your point in a later post that you are being somewhat tongue in cheek. Humour is one of the best helps there is in spreading prejudice, the irish know this well.

To say "no-one will want it it's ferro" is nearly as bad as to say "No-one wants a Bavaria, the keels fall off." Unfortunately the prejudice persists because if enough people keep saying something, it gains general acceptance.
 
Funnily enough it looks as though it's kept at Old Fallbarrow Hall, next door. Could be wrong.
The RWYC has a very active GP14 fleet and this may be a top boat. But, ouch, it sounds like a lot of money.
They are changing their fleets to take into account the newer skiff type boats and are going towards handicap racing rather than fleets.
This may account for quite a few boats for sale as people try to get the best handicap opportunities.

Not a member, but know a few.
 
greenalien said:
My tongue was firmly in my cheek!

Actually, I agree that ferro has some advantages, particularly for larger boats - hull build cost and ease of finding repair materials in far-flung places being just 2 - but despite this, it has never had mass-market appeal. Why not?
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Well, The boat needs to be over 40' to take this material and be of heavy displacement lines and is therefore not intended for racing or speed. This means that not many have been made which hopefuly answers your question on mass-market appeal. When you look arround, most boats are between 25 and 30' so need to be made of a more suitable material to give good performance.
 
cowpat said:
Well, The boat needs to be over 40' to take this material and be of heavy displacement lines and is therefore not intended for racing or speed. This means that not many have been made which hopefuly answers your question on mass-market appeal. When you look arround, most boats are between 25 and 30' so need to be made of a more suitable material to give good performance.
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But the material appeals to those desiring a comfortable cruising boat between 30'-40' - a very significantly sized group, I would have thought, especially the impecunious prepared to self-build. I was once myself tempted in my youth and did research into the subject.

The problem with any ferro-cement hull, particularly an amateur build with no provenance, comes from the difficulty of knowing if the critical mixing, pouring and setting techniques have been correctly observed and that's after an adequate steel frame and ribs have been properly welded up. Most importantly, that the mix is applied evenly, internally vibrated through for the team of expert plasterers to fair the hull with sufficient layer over the steel mesh and framing - and all in one application. Only a sectional destruction test will assure that was complied with and that there were no voids - in that section.

Even a professional hull is no guarantee that the building procedures were correctly adhered to. Back in the 1970s when I sailed out of Whitby a new club member bought an Endurance 35, a Peter Ibold design, built in ferro-cement by an established yard in Norfolk specialising in the construction. He took delivery himself and sailed north for Whitby, arriving to the east of the entrance at night on a falling tide and, not having local knowledge or much navigational experience, put her aground on the flat scaur rocks that run far out on that side.

This need not have been a problem, she would have re-floated on the flood but Murphy is always with us when we go to sea and the change of tide brought a strong on-shore wind. Pounding on her bilge she soon pulverised that area, started leaking then breaking up and the owner walked ashore, no longer a boat-owner.

I walked out to the wreck a few low tides later, and idly picked up a complete fragment of the topsides, torn away in its entirety from between the steel ribs, both external to internal skins - they flapped open and closed, hinged on the mesh, there was no bonding whatsoever between them, the hardened cement surface could be seen on both sides. They had clearly been separately applied, from inside and out, instead of the necessary forcing through from inner to outer for no voids to form.

There's nothing wrong with a properly constructed ferro-cement boat, for as they say, it's really a steel boat with cement to keep the water out. But how to know if it was properly constructed?
 
Barnac1e said:
..... But how to know if it was properly constructed?
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I wonder if acoustic methods could be used to check for cracks and de-laminations in steel / cement composites? In the oil and gas industry this method is used to determine the cement bond between steel casing and set cement slurry. It can determine what we call micro annulus; thin sections of de-bonding.

Perhaps such a non destructive method exists in the civil engineering sector to test cement structures.
 
cowpat said:
Well, The boat needs to be over 40' to take this material and be of heavy displacement lines and is therefore not intended for racing or speed. This means that not many have been made which hopefuly answers your question on mass-market appeal. When you look arround, most boats are between 25 and 30' so need to be made of a more suitable material to give good performance.
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There was one notable exception at least to the first sentence. In 1973, the ferro yacht Helsal won line honours in the Sydney to Hobart race, in 3 and a bit days. I remember from the time there were said to be some innovative techniques used building it. The owner did not persist with ferro however, but campaigned a series of Helsals, some of which are still sailing.

I would not be surprised if he got tired of his mates sneering at him for owning "a flying footpath".

Whatever, it is very difficult to find out anything about the first Helsal.

I blame cars for the lack of mass-market appeal. When the mass market came into yachting, they looked for boats that were like cars, that is series produced, standardized and above all, with a shiny finish. GRP works well for that sort of production.
 
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