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Quality vs. Quantity

Copyright 1997-2006 Michael Kasten

 

In these pages we have no problem with the far-out, the new, the old.  Among these various diverse types, my own focus is usually toward the "classic" whether new or old, and is further aimed toward vessels that are practical and well suited to voyaging. 

In other words, I aim to avoid designs that are unwholesome, poorly conceived, overly complicated, or just downright ugly. These judgments are not really such a tough call to make!  But like everyone - I also have opinions, so it is nearly impossible to be completely objective...!

In looking over the variety of boat designs on the market, we will observe that many of those designs are mass marketed.  Among those, we may even find quite a number of boats built to any given design.  It should be recognized though that this is not a statement of quality - only of quantity...  After all, there are also a lot of Twinkies, Cheese Whiz and cheap bottles of Gallo sold, rather than good crepes, gorgonzola, camembert, cabernet and shiraz.

This analogy is not entirely silly...! When faced with these kinds of choices, it just comes down to experience, and learning how to recognize the difference.

For example, we observe many distinctly unwholesome boat designs that are are heavily marketed, a number of which are pandered as being well suited to ocean travel. In fact there often seems to be an inverse relationship between the quality offered, and the effort that is expended in advertising.  Quantity marketing...!

As is unfortunately the case with many mass marketed stock boat designs, one's relationship with the designer will often be minimal and the plans will probably not cost much. 

This is commonly imagined as being a "good deal." 

In the end however, building a cruising boat or passagemaker will cost quite a lot of money - possibly even one's life savings - and it will consume a large amount of one's personal time.  If one's choice of design does not in the end turn out to be suitable for the intended purpose, then even if the design were "free" one could hardly refer to it as a bargain!

When stock boat designs become just another commodity item, there seems to be little qualitative criteria applied to differentiate among them, except possibly to take note of how many of those boats may have been built before. Quantity again...!

As an example, we might very well ask, "Is Slocum's 'Spray' the best boat for offshore voyaging...?" 

Hardly.  It is equally stable upside down as it is upright!  And the range of positive stability is not so large to begin with.  How many of those have been built...?  A LOT of them! 

If it turns out that a cheaply obtained design is not suited to the owner or owner-builder's intended use, it may very well turn out to be the most expensive "investment" mistake that person ever makes.

At the other extreme is custom yacht design. Here, a designer works with someone who knows more or less what they want but may be unable to find it in the market place, or who may not know what they want and would just like some guidance, or perhaps simply wants a newly designed vessel that is exactly tailored to their specific requirements.  Although not widely imagined, this need not be a costly process.  After all, it is one of the primary goals of the custom design process to avoid major pitfalls in the realm of boat ownership.  This alone has the potential to save quite a lot in the long run. 

Other benefits of creating a new boat design are numerous.  For example, a newly developed design is able to take advantage of the most up to date technology in terms of design and analysis via software, and in terms of materials and manufacturing. 

One often overlooked example of this strategy is that if the new design has been computer generated, there is the opportunity to take the digital model to the next logical step and make use of the efficiencies offered by computerized metal cutting.  By this process one can realize a substantial savings of time and effort during fabrication, as well as vastly improved accuracy. 

If the boat will be professionally built, this translates into a very attractive labor savings, which then becomes a cost savings to the owner.  If the boat will be amateur built however, the amount of fabricating time saved will be dramatically greater.   Even if an amateur builder's labor costs are expressed only in terms of rent and groceries - there will still be an overall cost savings...!

'Lest we diverge from the topic at hand... 

Between the two extremes expressed above, one will naturally find many excellent stock boat designs available that may indeed be well suited to the purpose at hand.  With any such stock design, unless the designer is deceased, there should be ample design documentation and ongoing support during the building of the vessel.  For example, a designer should always be willing to provide quick answers to simple construction questions.

In some cases, a builder or an owner will want to hire the designer for various construction related support tasks.  Some owners or builders may wish to have quite a lot of help, or may even request on-site inspections of the vessel under construction, and for that the designer will naturally bill for the time expended.

It is with these thoughts in mind that we offer a variety of wholesome boat designs among these pages.  We wish mainly to encourage good judgment and "boat-sense" when choosing a design, rather than to blindly assume that the quantity of boats built has anything at all to do with the inherent quality of its design.

After all, is it not often that which is the most difficult to find which proves to be the most rewarding...?

Michael Kasten   Metal Boat Quarterly #11 - Summer 1997 Editorial - Updated 2003 & 2006 NEXT EDITORIAL...