What is your inspiration?
What is your inspiration, and where do you get ideas from?
I start with my story and my source of inspiration and reasoning.
I got into boating when my dad bought an old and very beat up 24 foot, flat bottom, open steel tug-boat.
It had a 9 hp single cylinder air cooled diesel engine which made so much noise we had to wear hearing protection.
I was 13 years old and me and my friend used to ride our bikes down to the marina during break at school to take a short ride upstream in svartån, a river running through a Swedish town called Örebro.
This boat got me in love with old tug-boats and heavy duty work boats in general. I have spent many hours strolling the different marinas in every major city in Sweden looking for, and admiring old classic work-boats.
I have a affinity for heavy duty industrial stuff and solutions. When building a hifi-rig i use professional drivers from B&C and Beyma instead of consumer-rated hifi gear. When dreaming of boats i like to look at industrial grade designs and solutions.
I like the raw efficiency of industrial stuff. There is something very appealing with stuff made for a purpose, where sheer efficiency is much more important then the looks. (compare a bulldozer or a tank with a Volvo car, or the German battleship Scharnhorst with a Beneteau Oceanis 45).
I suppose this is why i prefer TIG-welding and HSLA steel instead of carbon fiber, and epoxy.
My old boat in the picture below.
I got interested in proas after reading about Russell Brown and his Jzerro. Something just seemed so efficient and “right” with the proa. The ultimate in raw efficiency and “purpose”. Very far from the floating houses that pass for multihulls today.
What is your inspiration, and where do you get ideas from?
Ideas? This is more a “How do I stop having them” problem with me. Everything inspires me. But there is not enough time to explore everything I’m interested in, and learn everything I want. I’ve worked hard to develop obsessive focus and the ability to shut out new, competing interests until I’ve completed the one at hand.
I like the raw efficiency of industrial stuff. There is something very appealing with stuff made for a purpose, where sheer efficiency is much more important then the looks. (compare a bulldozer or a tank with a Volvo car, or the German battleship Scharnhorst with a Beneteau Oceanis 45).
There is a joy and honesty to purpose that makes it attractive to me. How well a design answers the design brief it was built to address is a huge part of how much I like something. It also defines how much I hate unfocused design briefs and designs that try to address many functions.
I have to to say I’m more enamored with efficiency as time passes. I find pleasure in doing more with less - hence my fascination with proas. Less raw power, more speed. Industrial solutions weren’t always concerned with efficiency until energy costs became a factor. When viewed in context of the time of design, industrial machines are easier to like.
I do think that things are different today. I drive my wife crazy repairing broken things for the challenge of developing understanding of how they work, and a stubborn refusal to just replace 98% good things with new, just because of a tiny failure. Our microwave stopped working last week due to a plastic interlock inside the door that cracked. Took me a hour to disassemble the door, figure out what went wrong, fabricate a new part (better, stronger) and get it running perfectly again. Why didn’t they just make the part right in the first place? Failure of a three cent injection molded part causes most people to buy a new $200 unit. And the damage to the planet due to double the needed manufacturing energy, double the raw materials and now two units stupidly designed to fail.
—
Bill in Ottawa
I have always had a drive to make things simpler—not simple, and not minimalist-for-minimalism’s sake, but simpler than they are now.
“From naive simplicity we arrive at more profound simplicity.” Albert Schweitzer
Here is Dan Ward’s 4-page take on The Simplicity Cycle: http://www.dau.mil/pubscats/pubscats/atl/2005_11_12/war_nd05.pdf
The proa is potentially the simplest solution to the sailing problem (and a kite-powered proa is the simplest of all, but I digress!). Just as sailing itself is the most efficient method of extracting useful power from wind—even the roughest sailboat operates very near the “Betz limit;” the theoretical maximum efficiency point for power extraction. It is not coincidence that the most powerful devices built by humanity, prior to about 1920, were sailing craft. Izzat cool or what?
I’ve written about simple proas, simple rudders and simple wingsails; will write about simple hull flying, simple ocean racing and simple hydrofoils. Removing (or combining) things from engineered systems, then running them to see what changes is a constant source of surprise and enlightenment for me.
Probably started as a kid. Solid fuel rockets have no moving parts, so were coolest. Jillions of horsepower, and no moving parts! (My dad was a rocket scientist. Honest) My brother’s and my first lawnmower engine teardown and rebuild was a total gas. We didn’t understand governors yet, so left out all those parts—and the engine ran! Not so much with the piston rings or valves left out. We had surprisingly good results leaving the carburetor off—replaced with a hand-held squirt-mister full of gasoline. And so discovered fuel injection.
Like Bill S, I find it can be tough to turn it off, once you let the floodgates open. I have learned the truism that in order to have good ideas you need to have a *lot* of ideas. It follows logically that most ideas will stink—but that’s all right, the gems are in there somewhere, they’re just coated in mud.
Cheers,
Dave Culp
Our microwave stopped working last week due to a plastic interlock inside the door that cracked. Took me a hour to disassemble the door, figure out what went wrong, fabricate a new part (better, stronger) and get it running perfectly again. Why didn’t they just make the part right in the first place? Failure of a three cent injection molded part causes most people to buy a new $200 unit. And the damage to the planet due to double the needed manufacturing energy, double the raw materials and now two units stupidly designed to fail.
I spent much of Sunday pulling the guts out of a multi-function laser printer (with video step-by-step, mind you). A microswitch had failed which wouldn’t allow a safety interlock to engage—foolishly designed as part of the printer’s high voltage power board! this is a 9” x 9” PCB with all the most expensive bits on it; priced at $150. On a $300 printer!
Once I had it apart and sussed the failure, I was able to thread a simple bread-bag wire-tie through and around the switch to hold it permanently engaged. Particularly satisfying as it was a 2-cent repair of a 25-cent part—on a $150 board!
Johannas, I wonder if you have considered working in aluminum? Alu can be cut and shaped with wood working tools (ordinary skillsaw with carbide blade, for instance) and welded with an inexpensive and low powered wire-feed welder, with or without CO2 gas. Only a very few multihulls have been built in alu, but it’s a wholly appropriate material, I believe, and completely recyclable—I both buy and sell scrap aluminum from a yard near my home—at nearly the same price!
Dave
Johannes, I wonder if you have considered working in aluminum?
Yes, many times. I usually revisit the idea every other month or so, but i don´t like aluminum.
I am very impressed by and inspired by Steve and Linda Dashew and their very strongly built, utilitarian and functional yachts. They have a very military/industrial approach with raw efficiency, clean lines and low maintenance materials and construction. Sailing 350 miles in 24 hours in a cruising yacht with heavy duty aluminum plating and lots of lead hanging below the hull - is very impressive. People keep saying that weight is king when it comes to speed, but the Dashews are cruising at 18 - 27 knots with a heavy monohull, 5:1 L/B and several tones of lead.
If i had the cash i would love to buy a Beowulf yacht, but even if i had the cash i know there would always be a though in the back of my mind saying “what if….twice the length…half the width….outrigger…..etc, etc”, destroying all the fun…
I consider modern high strength steel to be a superior structural material to aluminum.
SSAB Weldox 960 has 960 N/mm2 (139000 psi) yield-strength, a Young´s modulus of 200, a surface hardness of 350 HBW (resisting chafe), compared to Aluminum (5083) having a 200 N/mm2 (as welded) (29000 psi) yield strength, 72 GPa Young´s modulus and a surface hardness of 95 HBW. Steel is roughly 3 times as heavy, but can have 4 - 6 times the yield strength (depending on the welds).
2,77 times more stiff (before deformation), much harder, and many times stronger (strength/weight ratio), easy to weld with very little loss of strength. Aluminum does not have a fatigue limit, meaning that regardless of load/strain it will fail sooner or later, and this in a highly cyclic repetitive stress environment.
Cheers,
Johannes
Inspiration
I love it to find simple and cheap solutions for a lot of design questions. When I started designing my interest always had a focus on simple and small boats with a good potential of speed. The key to me was the light displacement boat ... without carbon and high tech. Clean, light and efficient hulls with relative small sailarea and therefore low costs. Always connected with the loss of standing height and “so called” comfort. To be honest, I never miss comfort when I go sailing, because the pure sailing fun is a hundred times more worth to me than standing inside a sailing boat. I need a comfortable place to sit, to sleep, to cook, to navigate and to look around with a cup of tea in my hands ... thats all.
As long as I can think and sail I love it to make things better as they are. The tuning of a sailing boat, making it better and faster as before without horrible amounts of money, is what makes me smile when a idea is working well. ( I just lost two yardstick points because of that).
Call me a green guy, but I like second hand material and the idea of recycling. If you have not much money and normally cannot afford your dream boat, what will you do? Buy a second hand boat no matter the speed potential and sailing abilities ... just to be out and go sailing? May be, but for me ... no thanks. I like it fast and If I want to have a multihull I want to have a good one, fast, safe and well balanced. And there are solutions to this problem if you are willing to work for your dream! The second hand market will make it possible to pay what you need.
My inspiration is (mainly) second hand too. I seldom have a idea for a totally new concept of boat. Normally I see a interesting concept on the internet, in a book or just a boat in the habour and then my brain starts working ... what if… maybe ... what for ... maybe combined with this and that…nice idea, but I would do it another way…
If the idea is longer than 48 hours in my mind its worth to take the scetchbook and make some notes.
Articles are a source for inspirations. When I read an article or a story about sailing sometimes I ask myself how the boat would look for this guy in the story or for me when iam the guy.
Try out yourself, read this: http://www.woodenwidget.com/milionaire.htm and imagine how your boat would look if you are the millionaire.
Dick Newick ones said (freely interpreted): A multihull provides comfort, low cost and speed. But unfortunately you can pick just two of them. I always choose the two last ones.
A proa is truly in this, a sailing statement of simplicity and a possible solution for a lot of boating wishes. Winding back the spiral towards simplicity and pure sailing fun!
Finally, for me this forum is a big source of inspiration (and knowledge) with lots of ingenius ideas from very open minded people.
Greetings from the North Sea Coast, Michel