guide to make boat

A nice boat is one of the real pleasures of life, particularly when we have built it ourselves, with our own hands and using skills that we have developed over a range of projects. We put so much of ourselves into building a boat, in the form of time, effort, sweat, pain and occasionally some blood, that we should be proud of what we are doing. We do it out of love for what we are doing and what we are creating. We sometimes do it on a shoestring budget because we want to get as much boat as we can for the $$ that we can afford.

There are many places that we can cut costs and most of them involve us doing the work ourselves rather than paying a specialist worker to do it for us. That is a valid and satisfying way to reduce the cost of the project.

Another way is to reduce the costs of the hardware and other equipment. This can be by doing without a non-critical piece of equipment and accepting the possible reduction in efficiency. You might also find some reasonable used hardware to suit your boat that has enough life left in it to be worthwhile buying. Or you may choose to buy some cheaper hardware. It may be cheap because it is inferior and might give problems in use. Alternatively, it may be cheap because the products that you are buying are black market items, possibly stolen from the factory or from someone in the legal supply chain. You have no way to know the origin of this equipment if bought from a dubious source. If you can't establish for certain that it is legal product don't do it. You place your boat at risk of confiscation by the police and you may go to jail if you or your boat are found to have stolen goods, a risk not worth taking. Don't buy from dubious sources.

If you are a boat designer then you will, of course, use your own plans. If not, you will have to source plans for a boat that suits your needs. When researching what plans are available, bear in mind that the price that you will pay for the plans is very small when compared with the total cost of your new boat, probably less than 2% of the boat cost. This is not the right place to try to reduce the overall cost of your new boat project. It is unwise to build an expensive building on a cheap foundation.

To get to the real purpose of this post, you will occasionally see boat plans advertised by third parties who claim that they are unused and legal plans. They will sell to you at a fraction of the cost of buying those plans direct from the designer. Be wary of this offer, it might come back to bite you.

I currently have a situation that I am trying to resolve. I became aware of someone starting to build a boat to one of my designs far away from me. His name was unfamiliar to me and does not appear in my customer database. I contacted him to enquire about the plans he is using. He was convinced that he had legal unused plans because the person from whom he bought them told him so. That person was also not in our database but told us who had sold them to him, from another country thousands of miles away. That third person was the original buyer of the plans but by searching emails from years back it became clear that he had all of the structural components cut to build his boat from those plans soon after he bought them.

Boat plans are generally sold with a licence for the construction of only one boat; it is illegal to build more than one unless authorised by the designer. Before buying plans from anyone other than the designer or his agents you should contact the designer to ask if the plans can be sold to you, simply to protect yourself from possible future problems. If it can be confirmed that no boat was started to those plans then you will probably be able to buy them. If it can't be confirmed then don't take the chance.

The small saving that you might have from buying plans from an unauthorised source is really not worth the potential hassles attached to them. Not least of these hassles is the possibility that your local authorities will confiscate your boat. On a few occasions I have been requested to supply a letter confirming that a builder had the legal rights to build the boat. This information is required by some national authorities, who are increasingly clamping down on copyright infringements. Boat plans are intellectual property so anyone using them illegally is stealing from the designer and opening themselves up to prosecution.

The other factor that comes into this is that you should endeavour to have a good relationship with the designer of the boat that you are building. No-matter how good the plans are, there may be times when you want to ask a question to clarify an issue. If you have bought unauthorised plans then you cannot expect to receive any support from the designer, you will be on your own. All this trouble, just to save yourself maybe 1% of the cost of your complete boat.




 

We are featuring one boat per month, with photos generously supplied by their owners. All are beautiful photos, some in exotic places. Some are owner-built, others professionally built. Each is interesting in its own way.

I recently spent a week in Louisville, Kentucky, for IBEX 2012 . The tone at the convention was pretty upbeat and the exhibitors were very positive after the show about the number of visitors and quality of enquiries that they received. In confirmation of other industry indicators, the boating industry seems to be slowly coming out of the lengthy recession that has plagued us all for the last few years.


Now is a good time to be in the market to buy a boat, before prices start to go up again. That applies as much to used boats as to new ones. There are many boats that owners have put up for sale, for economic or other reasons. There are some very good deals available to those who want to to take advantage of this market.

We have some quality boats listed in the brokerage section of our website. They are generally boats that have been well loved by their owners and have proven themselves through extensive cruising to faraway places. They have been well maintained and are extensively equipped, ready to go wherever your dreams would like to take you. The available boats range from the classic fast cruiser Shearwaters to the very modern and eye-catching Dix 61.

Go to our brokerage section to see the listings. If you are interested in any of these boats, please contact me by email and I will connect you with the seller. We don't offer full brokerage service, so your dealings will be directly with the seller. The benefit to you is reduced brokerage fees, so lower purchase cost.

Please visit our website to see our full range of designs.

My last post was about IBEX, which is now a bit over 2 weeks away in Louisville, Kentucky.

News since then is that my self-built prototype of the Paper Jet design will be displayed at the show. If you want to see it, you will find it in the Lobby C Entrance of the Convention Center. I will set it up with the Turbo Rig jib and mainsail set. It will be there for the duration of IBEX.

Aside from my own presentations, I will also be attending other sessions. I will be at my boat occasionally during the show but can't say ahead of time when I will be there.

Louisville, Kentucky, is the home of the Kentucky Derby. Even as a kid growing up in South Africa I had heard about the Kentucky Derby. I had also heard about Kentucky Blue Grass but didn't really know what it was until I tried it for seeding a part of my lawn in Hout Bay that persistently refused to grow with local grass types. Until then it might have been a distant cousin of California Grass for all I knew.

Now Kentucky has another attraction to boast. IBEX, the International Boatbuilders' Exhibition & Conference, was relocated to the Kentucky Exposition Center in Louisville from the previous venue in Miami Beach, Florida, about 3 years ago. The new location is much more central and convenient to visitors from the whole Eastern half of USA and is not far from the Great Lakes.

I have been a speaker at IBEX on occasions in the past, when it was in Miami Beach. This year I will be involved in 3 sessions and hope that some followers of my blog may be able to attend one or more sessions.

Session 507 on Wednesday October 3rd is titled "Wood Kits" and will be shared with John C Harris of Chesapeake Light Craft.

Session 807 on Thursday October 4th is titled "Metal Sailboat Kits" and will be shared with Brian Russell of Odyssey Yachts.

Session 907 on Thursday October 4th is titled "Innovative Wooden Structures" and will be shared with Joe Parker of Pro-Set Epoxies.

I will also be presenting one of my new designs at the Pechakucha, so I will have a busy schedule.

Louisville is not entirely landlocked, as the uneducated like me tend to expect. In fact, it is situated on the banks of the Ohio River, which sees large volumes of commercial traffic up and down river on large barges moved around by pusher tugs. The Ohio River is the largest tributary of the Mississippi River, which takes its waters into the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans.

IBEX is a great place to learn about all manner of subjects to do with boats and boating, whether you are a professional in the boating industry, an amateur builder or a consumer. Come join us on the blue grass of Kentucky near to the waters of the Ohio.

Today I received the sad news of the passing of my friend, colleague and mentor, Bob van Niekerk. He will be sadly missed.

Bob was a very accomplished designer and builder, with a history in various industries that included sports cars, powerboats and surfboards. I remember, as a young teenager, watching the Dart and Flamingo cars of GSM (Glass Sport Motors) racing at Killarney, the local Cape Town race track. I have always thought that the Flamingo was one of the prettiest cars ever built and would still love to own one. Bob and his colleagues were a great inspiration to so many people.

Bob was almost unbeatable in offshore powerboat racing. His big offshore racing cats held the top spots for decades and many are still racing and still winning.

He also did a large amount of work with the South African armamants company Armscor. His work with them was designing catamaran patrol boats for harbour and coastal defense. His big coastal patrol boat was too pretty, in my opinion, to serve a military role.

Bob was a contemporary and friend of my parents, living not far from us, waterside, at Zeekoevlei in Cape Town. At that time I was a young child, a long way from choosing my own direction in life and Bob was already an accomplished designer. It was many years later that the two of us were to team up for the design of the 72ft "Sea Princess" ferry and party boat that operates from the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town.

Dehlia, Michelle and I offer our sincere condolences to Laurette and family. RIP Bob, you will be remembered for a long, long time.

Dudley Dix

We have a strong on-line presence and most of our business comes via our website. However, I built the bulk of that website in the mid 1990s, when the South African market had collapsed along with apartheid and was no longer able to sustain boat designers on local orders. I had learned to hand code html as a last ditch way of bringing food to the table for my family.

In the 80s I was building a nice international market, then politics got in the way with sanctions and I lost that international market very quickly. The same politics artificially inflated the demand for long distance sailboats in South Africa and that supported a few other designers, aside from myself, for a few years. When Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and the world didn't explode in horror, the demand for boats evaporated, many boats came onto the market and suddenly we were no longer able to sell our services.

Income went from fairly comfortable to almost zilch and I did not have the resources to wait for things to maybe change at some time in the future. I saw the newly spreading Internet as the only way that I was likely to rebuild my international market, to rescue my family from the jaws of starvation.

After a foray into website building software available at the time I soon realised that to make this work efficiently I would have to learn how to hand code. I did that with books and lots of trial and error. I also soon found out what worked for me in terms of the amount and type of information that I had to make available to visitors. I learned all about sizing graphics for efficient download and efficient coding for the same purpose.

In those days of universal dial-up Internet the dividends were great because my website was so much faster-loading than my competitors. We developed markets in faraway places because people could see what I wanted to show instead of waiting interminably for graphics that sometimes caused the download system to crash. Having only had dial-up myself, I knew that I had customers in Europe who wanted me to look at their projects on-line and I sometimes couldn't see more than 25% down a page loaded with photos before the download crashed. I swore to not be guilty of that error in my own website, so everything revolved around presenting info efficiently rather than trying to entertain visitors with fancy effects that waste download bandwidth.

Those days are long gone and we now live in USA with high speed fibre optic Internet access and very fast downloads. However, I have not forgotten the lessons learned about efficient downloads. I still have a considerable market in places that don't have high speed Internet. I keep my graphics small and my coding efficient for those people. My website has on occasion been criticised by some as "an eyesore" or other nasty descriptions but I let it wash over me. The criticism is undoubtedly from people who do not understand the demographic at which it is targeted.

Now, unexpectedly, we have gone full circle and efficient downloads are once again an advantage. I am relieved that I did not resize the photos on my site, which would have entailed many hundreds of hours of work.

The closing of this circle is due to the fact that more people are now using smart phones for their Internet access than their laptop or desktop computers. The importance for us vendors with websites is that download speeds with telephones and wireless services is considerably slower than it is with cable or fibre optics. Also, the size of a smart phone screen makes the use of smaller images quite practical. Smaller images give faster downloads, so the ever more impatient Internet traveller does not leave my website in disgust because it has not started to download within 5 seconds. Our attention span and demand for instant gratification is such that we want the information to appear in front of us almost at the same time as we click the link.

So, to finally get round to the purpose of this post, I have set up a mobile version of my website, optimised for efficient download onto the small screen using wireless downloads. The direct link is http://m.dixdesign.com/ and will take you into the new mobile home page. From there you can choose links to browse our images in photo albums, view our YouTube videos, browse design pages or even place an order. If you prefer, you can also access our entire main website as you might have done before.

As always, we appreciate our customers and the support that you have given us over the past 30+ years, of which more than half have been since I built my first tentative website in the early hours of the morning and waited in terror for the visitors to arrive, to rescue us from our predicament. I say a big thanks to all of you, who now number in the thousands, for your support in the past and I assure you of our best intentions to keep you coming back in the future, with interesting design concepts to build.

Visit our main website at http://dixdesign.com/
Visit our mobile website at http://m.dixdesign.com/