Paragone reviewed The Elements of Boat Strength by Dave Gerr
IF you intend to build any boat, THEN invest in this.
5 stars
All the boats that fail, fall-apart, burst, drown, split, or otherwise sink due to something other than crew mismanagement, are boats built either:
- on incompetent design
- on incompetent mistargetting ( like that riverboat that somebody was sailing in the ocean, and it just snapped in 2, with only the deck holding the front & rear halves together ), or
- on incompetent/scammy building.
This book & the McNaughton Scantlings book ( I have both, and on any build I do, I'm going to do both sets of calculations, & compare them, to see if there are any obvious defects in 1 or the other: offshore is betting one's life ), are the only 2 books which give you how to calculate what materials to put where, in order to end up with a safe-in-the-ocean boat.
Dave Gerr gives you the ability to calculate everything's required materials, so you can build a …
All the boats that fail, fall-apart, burst, drown, split, or otherwise sink due to something other than crew mismanagement, are boats built either:
- on incompetent design
- on incompetent mistargetting ( like that riverboat that somebody was sailing in the ocean, and it just snapped in 2, with only the deck holding the front & rear halves together ), or
- on incompetent/scammy building.
This book & the McNaughton Scantlings book ( I have both, and on any build I do, I'm going to do both sets of calculations, & compare them, to see if there are any obvious defects in 1 or the other: offshore is betting one's life ), are the only 2 books which give you how to calculate what materials to put where, in order to end up with a safe-in-the-ocean boat.
Dave Gerr gives you the ability to calculate everything's required materials, so you can build a lighter & cheaper build for inland sailing, or a robust boat for offshore, or anything in between ( coastal, e.g. ).
There is no equivalent to this book.
Unfortunately, it doesn't cover multihulls, and the ISO standards required for meeting their minimum standards ( those standards apparently are bottom-of-the-barrel ), cost 200 Euros per piece of the standard, and you need several pieces ( they seem to have written them to force one to have to buy all of them?? )
Multihull designers of offshore boats may require full-on engineering services, instead of mere scantlings-calculating books...
Anyways, Aluminum, Wood, Composite, iirc steel is also in here ( iirc concrete isn't in here ), it can take awhile to work through all the equations for your particular build, ( this part gets this thickness, that part gets that thickness ), but experience-derived scantlings is your only method that is going to give you a trustworthy boat, and you have only 2 options, as noted above.
Worth its weight in platinum, for anyone who ends up in a boat designed by you, obviously: lives are on the line.
I also recommend his other books, or Nigel Calder's books, for filling-in the rest of one's understandings for designing/building a habitable, solidly-built, boat.
Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen.
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