The purpose of this project is to design and mass-produce kits for a floating tiny house that can sail. It combines high-tech modeling and fabrication and low-tech assembly that can be carried out DIY-style on a riverbank or a beach. This boat is a four-bedroom with a kitchen, a bathroom/sauna, a dining room and a living room. The deck is big enough to throw dance parties. It can be used as a river boat, a canal boat or even a beach house. It's rugged and stable enough to take out on the ocean.

Friday, December 15, 2017

Hull Shape Revisited

Click to enlarge
The second post on this blog, which I started almost exactly four years ago, was titled “Hull Shape” and featured the sketch shown on the left. A lot of work went into it. Concerns such as minimizing cost, maximizing ease of construction, maximizing interior living space and many others were addressed. A key feature of the design was the ability to combine the structure of the keelboard trunks with the water ballast tanks. Their position and size were based on many constraints, but the result was that water ballast alone turned out to be insufficient. Although it was more than enough to ensure stability under sail, more ballast would have to be added further aft in order for the boat to sit on its lines.

After many design iterations, the additional ballast was confined to a steel scrap-filled cement block bolted in place under the chain locker, which is, in turn, located under the cockpit. An entire sequence of steps was drawn up for dropping it out, with the boat in the water, before sweating the boat ashore using the anchor winch (to serve as a temporary beach house) and for winching and bolting it back into place with the boat once again in the water. But it was, essentially, a complication. And now, after four years of thinking through all of the various details, happily, it turns out to be unnecessary.

One of the worst mistakes one can make is to build based on an imperfect plan: build in haste, as it were, repent at leisure. Four years may seem like a long time to design just one boat. Most boat designers worry about time to market, remaining competitive, keeping the money coming in and other such issues. I am not worried in the least about any of that. I just want to design a very good boat that I am going to like, and that plenty of others will too. I am quite a few years yet away from retirement, my son is a few years yet from being able to serve as master of a ship, and so I am not going to rush. When designing something and faced with a problem, bad ideas are the first to arrive, while the good ones can take a very long time.

That said, the project is moving along. Thanks to the crowdfunding exercise of last summer, we are now running on licensed/donated CAD software (instead of lots of evaluation versions) and have a new, powerful, dedicated server box for doing renderings and running simulations. There is a list of a dozen or so to-do items, none of them huge, that have to be worked out before we can have the plans analyzed and signed off on by a marine architect, and we have the money to pay him. The questions to be answered are along the lines of “How thick should we make the fiberglass”, “What gauge steel do we use” and so on. Once past that point we will accept equity investment and start building hulls in several places around the world where people are waiting for us.

That is actually a good position to be in, making it a very good time to try very hard to resolve the few remaining unsatisfactory issues with the design. The solid ballast box is one issue. The fact that the sails are much more efficient on one tack than the other when sailing close-hauled is another. We’ll deal with that one later; today we kill the solid ballast box.

When I drew up Quidnon’s initial lines, I tried to follow Phil Bolger’s advice about square boats—that complicating their hull shapes adds more to their complexity and expense than it adds to their performance. But here is a counterexample: I believe that this change will subtract from the expense (no more solid ballast box or the mounting brackets it requires; simpler hull shape aft because the recess for the box is no longer needed) while boosting performance.

Previously, the bottom of the hull forward of amidships consisted of the bottom and two sides joined at two chines. The angle between them was 100º aft of amidships while forward from amidships it decreased until they met at a point at top and center of the bow, where the angle between them went to 0. The modification is that forward of amidships there are now four surfaces rather than three that come together to a flat spot at top and center of the bow. The bottom is now formed from two surfaces, and the centerline, called the stem, is buried a bit deeper than the two chines. This modification adds the exact amount of buoyancy forward that’s needed to make the boat sit on its lines without the fixed ballast mounted aft.


But then there are the other benefits. First, there is the improved motoring performance. When sailing on almost any point of sail Quidnon heels over a bit and presents a lopsided “V” to the water, which cuts very well through the waves. But when motoring the hull sits level and the flat surface presented to the waves at the bow slows it down. Just a small amount of deadrise at the bow (that’s the term for the “V” shape of the bottom) is enough to deflect the flow of water to the sides rather than making the boat bounce up and down while pushing an energy-wasting roll of froth with the bow (a boat with “a bone in its teeth” is Bolger’s term for that effect).

Simulations using Orca3D software showed that prior to this change to the hull shape Quidnon would actually take less power to push forward at hull speed when loaded with 10 tons of cargo then when motoring empty. This was because when empty the stern would be quicker to bog down. Getting rid of the cargo box will lighten the stern, and the added buoyancy at the bow will extend the effective waterline length, both of these changes counteracting this tendency. Moreover, when motoring along rivers and canals with the masts dropped there is no reason not to drain the water ballast, to lighten the load. Under these circumstances, having solid ballast mounted aft would be most unhelpful. When motoring without the ballast, Quidnon may be able to push its hull speed somewhat. We’ll run simulations to confirm this.

One more benefit: the slight “V” shape at the bow will not only deflect the flow of water but also of floating debris and ice chunks. Without this feature, the debris would wash directly past the prop, possibly fouling it. And as for ice, Quidnon is by no means meant to serve as an icebreaker, but it should be able to sail through many forms of ice. Sailing through ice is a big topic, and I will take it up separately later, but Quidnon’s bow turns out to be almost perfect for powering through pancake ice, slush, thin crust and other varieties of frozen water that occur in the fall and the spring. Having an “icebreaker” bow surfaced with roofing copper may allow Quidnon to extend the season a month or so in each direction.

Lastly, this change to the bow shape adds a welcome visual feature to what was previously a rather blank and featureless bow. Now, Quidnon’s hull shape is not designed to titillate—it will do enough other things that other boats can’t do to make up for its somewhat unexciting hull shape—but having a bow that looks more like a bow than like half a transom is a nod in the general direction of boating fashion that some people would I am sure welcome.

25 comments:

  1. Happy to hear an update!

    It would be helpful to see some renders of the revised design. It's a bit hard to picture from what you've described.

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    1. There are no renderings because the model hasn't been worked out yet. We are going to have to run Orca3D simulations, then iteratively tweak the geometry until the parameters even out. After that we'll be able to do renderings of the new hull shape. It's a rather subtle change, but important.

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  2. Excellent! Can't believe it's been 4 years.

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  3. Following with great interest. Would NZ be a manufacturing location for your first run..?

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    1. More or less any location near water that can receive a fractional container of parts is a potential build locations. So far we've had inquiries from Texas, Florida, California, Alaska and Australia.

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  4. I look forward to the first hulls being built!

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  5. There should be a scifi writer somewhere doing a novel on a Quidnon community post meltdown. I read something in that vein long ago, cannot remember title or author. Just that the world had gone bad, and the only people more or less thriving were ship bound. These were large ships. Also, the food chain had largely contracted to krill and people.

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    1. I've actually entertained the idea of an indie dystopian movie, based upon a Father & son who survived the appocolypse with a partially completed Quidnon, and who have to then complete the boat in secret in order to get out from under the thumb of the new local warlord, float on down the Mississippi River towards the Gulf of Mexico with the goal of escaping the former US altogether, with various distractions along the path. Imagine a modern (and dystopian) version of Huck Finn. I've taken it far enough that I have a general outline of the story. Of course, I can't film it without the Quidnon, so it's not a hot project.

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  6. Wait a minute - how many years till retirement?

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    1. Estimates vary, but I don't want to wait that long. I want to start building hulls in 2018.

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    2. I’m glad to hear you don’t see imminent collapse. Thank you.

      Boat looks nice, by the way.

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    3. Oh, collapse is happening as we speak. It's just unevenly distributed around the planet.

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    4. That’s probably always been true, and always will be.

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    5. Actually, it was around Sep 11, 2009 when people stopped laughing at me about predicting collapse of the USA and started taking me seriously. And now, of course, they are all, like, "same old, nothing new." Yeah, sure, whatever!

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  7. Undoubtedly this will add significantly to the strength of the overall hull especially the bow. Bravo!

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    1. One of the realizations we had was that cold-molding the bend radii at the bow would require the use of no thicker than 1/4" plywood. Laminating 4 1/4" layers (to the 1" full thickness) without leaving voids is rather difficult and uncertain. The only other option would be to laminate bow sections during fabrication rather than during assembly, and that would complicate shipping (not something that can be flat-packed). And so we decided to use a single layer of 1/4" ply and finish the outside using a thick (exact thickness TBD) of fiberglass using fiberglass mat and cloth. The inside will be reinforced with closely spaced plywood ribs to limit size of unsupported fiberglass spans.

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  8. One more benefit: less noise at anchor. Chris Morejohn drops his bluewater sharpie stems below the waterline primarily for this reason. Anyone who has lived on sharpies with stems above the waterline, and I have lived on 2 (so far), knows what a racket a small chop makes smacking into that exposed bottom up forward. Go to numerous youtube videos of Jim Michalaks various sharpie and v bowed designs sailing (tons of them) to see the vast difference between them in noise underway. Quidnons new sharper entry may well drop noise. underway and at anchor, a lot.

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    1. Yes, that's the damned "shlorp-shlorp" noise. Drives you nuts after a while, especially if you are trying to sleep in the V-berth (U-berth in Quidnon's case). With this change, it will be more a soft "sploosh-sploosh" noise–much better. Thanks, Bob, I should have listed that among the benefits.

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  9. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  10. Where the steel scrap-filled cement block used to be, will that allow for a larger fuel tank? More battery space? Or do you have another vision for how to use the space vacated by this cement block?

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    1. It will go back to being an equipment chase, filled with pumps and other plumbing hardware.

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  11. I like the idea, but I don't know anything about sailing design so I asked a friend. He's definitely a bit of a sailing purist, though. Here's his feedback, any input?

    "Apologies for the negative waves, but I'm not a fan. Doesn't look like a usable sailboat design. It has lots of freeboard and there are many reasons why sailboats are built long and low. Some of the big ones are: the rolling motion gets ferocious up on the deck with that much distance from the roll center; the large area above the water line adds parasitic aerodynamic drag that decreases windward performance (the picture looks like the exposed hull area matches one of the sails, cuts windward lift in half); high freeboard means high CG which also means that recovery from a knock-down is harder (which means a deeper keel and more ballast which means more hydrodynamic drag). They also put a high performance under body (high aspect ratio fin keel and rudder) on a casual daysailer. The only people that us those are racers. They have deep draft, are twitchy to handle, and are exposed to damage from underwater collisions (those happen now and again and, trust me, it is really inconvenient to lose a rudder out in the ocean). Most cruisers have full length keels for easy handling with the rudder at the back end of the keel where it is protected or a protective skeg in front of the rudder."

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    1. There is a big difference between sailors and sailboat designers in their ability to design boats. Your friend is no exception.

      Sailboats are built long and low for performance. This is a houseboat, and performance is not important. Comfort and room for living aboard are the top priority.

      The rolling motion is minimal because the hull is so wide. Freeboard cuts windward lift much less than in half because wind speed increases as square of distance on deck and there is plenty of canvas up high.

      High freeboard doesn't say anything about CG because the design is ballasted. We've tested stability and knockdown recovery, and they are excellent.

      There is no keel.

      This is a houseboat, not a "casual daysailer."

      The keelboard and the rudder blade kick up in the shallows, and the boat can float through 2-foot shallows and be beached without damage.

      Full-length keels translate to very poor maneuverability; fin keels and efficient spade rudders are what's needed to easily maneuver in and out of marinas.

      In short, your friend is very badly informed, didn't bother to find out about the design. He pretty much looked at a picture and then shot from the hip. And missed.

      The moral of the story is, if you are interested in buying a houseboat, don't ask a "sailing purist."

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