People who strip boats

dylanwinter

dylanwinter

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www.keepturningleft.co.uk
In my ongoing low key Centaur hunt I have come across a couple of boats where some-one has bought the boat in reasonable nick and then completely stripped the inside and chucked everything they considered junk into a skip

woodwork, wiring loom, the works

and then given up on the project

what the heck were they thinking?

D
 
dylanwinter said:
In my ongoing low key Centaur hunt I have come across a couple of boats where some-one has bought the boat in reasonable nick and then completely stripped the inside and chucked everything they considered junk into a skip

woodwork, wiring loom, the works

and then given up on the project

what the heck were they thinking?

D
Click to expand...
Some "fit-out" & know little about boats
Others sail
 
30boat said:
I did it on my first boat,.Two and half years later I had a fully functioning yacht that twenty years on is still sailing.
Click to expand...

Yes, but most people do the easy bit & THEN suddenly realise the cost & effort required to sort it all out.

The bare hull is only about 20% of the cost & effort of a cruising boat - a comment often used to advise people looking at buying abandoned bare hull projects. There used to be a lot of bluewater concrete hulls constructed by builders & plasterers that sat in yards for years attracting hopeful impoverished dreamers.
 
Many years ago a guy in our yard bought a lovely old motorboat which had been built in Hong Kong. It was made from gorgeous Burmese teak which is probably virtually unobtainable today. His first job was to rip out the original interior, it was such a crime and there was a queue of us waiting to reclaim the wood. Someone made a tidy sum by selling bits to a specialist dealer in London.
 
I feel so much better. Our interior is delaminating "laminated" panelling. 5 years on and i've done almost none of it. Been sailing tho :-)
 
I suspect it's partly an underestimation of time or work required and partly changing circumstances. I started 'disassembly' of a Fletcher Arrowbolt a couple of years back and only now getting to the fun bit of putting it all back together! I work full time with two part-time occupations too and a lot can change in a couple of years when you don't get much time. :rolleyes: I was perhaps more realistic than some in that I estimated 18M to 2 years from the outset and a £5-6K budget. I suspect I'll be over-budget and already well over on time, but don't really care as a) I'm in enjoying it & b) we have a little 14' runabout to feed the need to get on the water! Would I do another? You bet! :cool: Without dreamers like myself, there would be even more landfill I suspect...
 
...playing Devil's Advocate, I've often wondered about the merits of a boat with a largely bare, open plan interior, particularly if she's very small. I'm designing a 6m cruising ketch with a small cabin and thinking about making it pretty simple and easy to alter. Admittedly my tastes are for rough-and-ready, bucket-n-chuck-it cruising/camping, with the minimum of electrics. Is this a legitimate defence of the stripped-out interior? Stoo
 
I acquired my wee Hunter as a stripped hull. The previous owner had very enthusiastically removed everything he could, and to be fair, much of it did need removing. However, it then sat for eighteen years before I got my hands on it. It took a lot of time, work and stuff over the next year to get her ready to sail again, and she's an inch shorter than a Wayfarer ...
 
The guy we bought our Harwich One Design from was one of these.

He had stripped all the canvas off the decks along with all the woodwork, coamings washboards cockpit edging etc and all the deck fittings such as fairleads, cleats and genoa track. He had then stripped all the paint off the topsides and had got as far as applying one coat of primer to the wood. He then dumped all the removed woodwork and fittings in the hull, put a canvas cover over and left it.

When we looked at her in this state my youngest son then aged about 10 said, "Dad, it's like buying an Airfix kit at a jumble sale, you are not sure if you have all the bits and don't know how they go together!"

How true, however we bought her, rebuilt her and had over 20 years happy sailing and racing.
 
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