Thursday night late I was back home in Västervik determined to get sailing in a new boat, Exlex Minor, 5.8 X 1.12 meters as soon as possible. Hence after sorting out several bourgeoi duties like mail, bank, internet I was back in workshop designing.
During my 40 days at sea I had well prepared my mind.
Nowadays yacht designing is almost exclusively done by computer and that is an excellent way of doing it. In the 70- I designed by ducks and splines. Later I got help from clever people with computers ,like John Letcher, Rolf Eliasson, Matt Layden and Guy Liljegren. At sea I thought of an other way.
Given a boats lenght, beam and draft there is a very simple way of figure out displacement using the prismatic coefficient. Prismatic coefficient is the fullness of the hull. 0.54 is common for sailboats. Sailboats also usally are 3 beams long, Exlex Minor hovewer are more than 5 beams long. Boats with a good lenght ratio can have higher prismatics. A higher prismatics gives more stability and a higher top speed for a given waterline lenght. I chose 0,7.
By multiply the midsection area by the lenght of the waterline by the prismatic the displacement is fond. In the case of Exlex Minor it is very simple just multiply beam by draft as its an rectangle
Exlex will have a waterline of about 5.6 meters she will have a beam of 1.12 meters. At 18 cm draft she gets 790 kilos displacement. At 20 cm draft ( about 8 inches) she gets 878 kilos displacement.
I started with a block of wood 58 cm long 5.6 cm vide and 9 cm high the bottom part was of MDF board to indicate the underwater part. The tricky part was to get the prismatics right, but as I have been around boats for a long time I got a sense of their shape. As they are usually 3 beams long I imagined a boat 3.36 meter long cut it in middle and added enough midpart to make it 5.8 meter long. Cargo ships are designed along similar lines, a forword part, an aft part and a parrallel middle section.
After shaping a half modell I made offsets of the surfaces and made a model.
Below are some pictures.
The wooden block being glued.
Clamping 3.7 mm plywood to the half modell to take off the lines.
The modell
The modell on a chair. More work will be done to her like giving her a spoon bow and make her waterproof. That done I will load her to 0.8 kilos, she is an 1/10 scale modell and float her to find her waterline.
I thank everyone who has donated money to help me with my project and get me back from Madeira. My economy has now crashed and I need to get plywood and other items for an full scale sailing modell before starting on the sandwich composite boat. I hope you will continue to support me. Me I will let everyone for free use my ideas and drawings as published here to build small safe enviromentally friendly boats. I really think I am into something new a good, a mountain bike for the oceans.
To be continued…
Regards Yrvind.
