Where do old boats go?

[Kelpie]

Think there are a couple of flaws in that argument.

Firstly - you have to strip the old boat down to basically a bare hull - thats labour you hve to py for - and then pay charges to scrap all the material.

Then you have to refit new gear into spaces not designed to fit originally and perhaps modified by 30 years of keen owners.


Whilst you might get discounts on the gear, but you will probably have to have a bespoke fit out plan for every single boat meaning no economies of scale in production, and laborious fitting and running of wires - no just dropping a premade wiring loom in.

Compare that to Ben Jen Bav - it all rolls out of factories, machine made - identical and is screwed, glued together in the same way hundreds of times - labour is minimised

At the end of your process you get say a 30 year old hull to a 35 year old design with new fittings that due to the additional labour used probably costs the same ( if not more) than a modern equivalent. What will poeple buy?

Fair points all. You would need standardisation to allow new gear to fit easily. Removal of corroded old fittings, and deterioration of glassed in components, make the idea less appealing.

The prices paid by DIYers for spares seems outrageous, though. I made myself feel much better about how much I paid for my boat when I flicked through a price list for the spares- I reckon I got my hull for nothing at all, if you add up the value of everything else.

 

[Tranona]

This process already goes on but probably best described as recycling. In this month's PBO there is an article about putting a new engine in a 30 year old Trapper 500. Cost nearly £7k when a typical asking price for the same model is around £12k often with a replacement engine. Why? because the owner is going to keep the boat for a long time and the incremental cost of getting anything significantly better for his needs is greater than that.

If you ignore osmosis the 4 major expenditure areas on a cruising yacht are engines, sails/rigs, electronics and interior furnishings. All of these give plenty of warning of failure and replacement can be put off or planned for. Rarely do boats change hands with all of these needing doing. So long term owners like myself can plan the expenditure over the years and buyers can pick a boat that has only one or maybe two items of major expenditure.

The end result of this process is constant recycling of structurally sound older boats.

However, it can never be a commercial proposition as the Trapper example above shows. Some cult boats are commercially recycled - Contessas would be a good example but as a general rule it only works at an individual level.

I can see this type of activity becoming even more common in the future, at least in the UK as new boats increase in price - up 20-30% in the last 2 years alone. The monetary values of 10-20 year old mid 30 footers has stayed much the same over the years, and individual major replacements as identified above are a smaller proportion of market value encouraging owners to keep boats up to date.

 

[Nautorius]

I know people who have bought two old boats and stripped one to sort out another. I did it with a GP14 and then a Leisure 17. Getting rid of an old GRP hull under 20ft is fairly easy as there are lots of dreamers on EBAY! I have also stripped a couple of boats and sold all the bits (including Hull) on ebay seperately for a nice profit.

You see lots of old boats on old creeks slowly dieing...they go through various ebay style owners.

Sooner or later they will have to be smashed up and recycled. Ironically enough, most new AWB's are made with a foam core that if it ever gets wet and delaminates may solve the problem. MOBO builders Searay had this issue in the 1990's and quite a few sank>

Paul