“…watching Brian labour over our drawings meant I sympathised with him too, especially after I started to do some of that kind of work myself.”
We’d returned to Ambler Ave in early 1974 after our partnership with Ken and Dianne broke up. I’d quit teaching and Heather’s handcraft business was ramping up, especially after Earthworks opened in ’75 — shoppers shoulder to shoulder, workshops and demos out the back, sausage sizzles on the street, beavering away in our garage/workshop making stuff to sell.
Heather was bringing in most of the family’s income, which I’ve already admitted wasn’t great for the male psyche — and one reason why I look back to what I was doing then with mixed feelings. Excitement at what we tried to do, guilt for walking away from it. Amazement at what we thought we could accomplish, sobering in terms of self-knowledge.
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What does require a paragraph or two is our short lived plan to build another, smaller boat — a 36 foot Colin Archer type double-ended gaff cutter, a beautiful Donovan design. Building started with a hiss and a roar, since I was no longer working, but in the end we were glad to see it go, and now neither of us can remember much about it.
We spent the proceeds on a big workshop for Heather where the boat shed had been. She was furiously busy, especially in the pre-Christmas rush. One Christmas Eve she was up until 3.00am making presents for the family. And my ferrocement preoccupations were changing. I’d already written my first contribution to the NZFCMA newsletter, and I was gradually taking over the practical business of editorship. Discovering that I enjoyed it — the editing, writing, draughting and lay-up — and most of all, wanting to do something with, and for, Brian Donovan.
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`I’ve written elsewhere about Ken and I going to see Brian at 1 Takarunga Rd to get the drawings we needed. Brian loved working on new designs, I said, but he was less prompt with the detailed work. Well, that was an understatement, but watching Brian labour over our drawings meant I sympathised with him too, especially after I started to do some of that kind of work myself. And the better we clients got to know him — and each other — the more we wanted to help this generous, overstretched, disorganised man succeed.
I can’t remember exactly how the idea germinated, but over time I think we came to believe that two things were necessary for “success” to happen — to have someone else manage the business side for him, and to capitalise on his portfolio of design work.
Brian certainly bought into both ideas, and as my personal experience grew — through our own project, and writing and illustrating articles for the Journal — I felt that I could contribute. In 1976 we set up a company called New Zealand Ferrocement Services Ltd. We’d already started to work on a catalogue of “stock designs”.
But here the “don’t remembers” start coming thick and fast. The company documentation is no longer available online and I can’t even remember who the shareholders were, although Gary Bowen, Dennis Broad, Brian and myself must all be candidates.
Neither can I remember the arrangement between the company and Brian himself.
What I do remember discussing with Brian and others is the designs we’d offer. We decided on 14 in all, eight of them yachts, of which only two were gaff-rigged. I’ve mentioned four of the yachts (Nulgarra, Kapowhai, Kopara and Amiri) in a separate post about Brian. The other four, fairly conservative by Donovan standards — all Bermudan rigs, no brigantines! — you’ll find in a postscript below.
Launches and 3rd-world commercial
Leaving aside the yachts, in the catalogue there were three launches, two very different fishing boats and an “auxiliary cargo ketch”. To introduce it I’d encouraged Brian to write a brief account of “design considerations” for ferrocement boats, which I’ve already quoted from, and which I’ve added in full as a postscript below. He said he couldn’t understand why there was comparatively little interest in the use of ferrocement in displacement power vessels, since the material was so well suited to that type of craft. The three launches in the catalogue were very different types — Timu, a “light, fast, 9.1m (30’) Sport Fisherman”, Tamure, a 28′ “traditional displacement cruising launch”, and Ellimek, a 30′ launch that could be fitted out as a “one-man fishing boat” if desired.
The remaining three designs were commercial. Two of them were described as “types no longer often seen in the ‘Western’ world, but which still play a vital role in the economies of the developing nations.”
That didn’t mean much to me until we arrived in the Solomon Islands in 1976 — an archipelago of six major islands and hundreds more smaller ones scattered across 249,000 square miles of ocean.
Even travelling to Honiara from our base on Tulagi was a three hour passage across open ocean in Tanya K, the company’s ex-mission boat, which made the crossing several times a week carrying cargo and passengers.
The catalogue explained that commercial designs don’t lend themselves easily to presentation as stock plans, since they are usually custom designed, or at least modifications from a basic design to suit the needs of a particular client. It describes the Indonesian (above) simply as a 12.5m (41′) fishing boat, “designed to meet the need for an economical vessel in developing countries” — sorry, you can blame me for omitting the name of the design from the Catalogue.
Karere (left, unless you’re reading this on your phone!) is described as a 12.2m (40′) auxiliary ketch designed for the carriage of small cargoes and a few passengers between islands or on coastal trade.
“She is capable of quick, economical construction, is of heavy displacement for cargo-carrying and has a simple sail plan to assist the engine in passage-making.”
Ironically, the first photo I stumbled across when writing this was a modification of the catalogue’s third fishing boat, Paruparu.
We’d described Paruparu in the Catalogue as “a modern type of small fishing boat suitable for pelagic trawling or long-lining, with accommodation in Western style for a crew or owner-operators who expect reasonable comfort.”
This particular Paruparu, fitted out for a completely different role, was built by Honiara Marina & Shipyard Co, which was set up by D. Bradshaw in Honiara “on a bare sand beach”, where they’d erected a leaf hut to hang frames and provide shade, and started work on their first vessel, a Hartley Coastal launch, with three untrained Solomon Islanders.
Mr Bradshaw wrote an article for the Journal in which he described building five other boats designed by Brian Donovan — two 50 footers built as island traders, a third for the local Marine Department as a survey vessel, one of 65ft for an American owner and another of 60ft for the Catholic Mission in the Western Solomons.
The company had apparently closed down by the time I arrived In 1978, but I owed them a debt of gratitude for Frank Titehi, a fine young man they’d trained, who became our ferrocement foreman. We had none of the problems that Brian described in Madagascar.
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Setting up in business
The Honiara story illustrates both the extent of Brian’s influence and his ability to design for a remarkably wide variety of clients and purposes. But my own goal was to help Brian capitalise on his past work, particularly those 14 stock designs. That was no easy task. If Brian had difficulty supplying drawings to Ken and me as we needed them, how could we expect him to supply them up front for all 14 in the catalogue? And also, what might people expect of us?
We decided to be honest and up front. First, in the catalogue we listed the “plans available” — i.e. already completed — for nine of the designs. The fact we didn’t do so for five of the yachts was presumably another oversight on my part.
Next we created a list of “typical details”. The intent is in the name — they were typical details. A drawing might show (for example) how to build “integral mild steel stern tubes and glands”, a feature common to all Brian’s boats, but they wouldn’t include specific dimensions etc for yours. They were “intended for general guidance only”, and you needed to follow “the requirements of the plans and specifications for the design under construction.”
Looked at now, the list is certainly an intimidating amount of work. Brian’s files have unfortunately disappeared, but much of it he’s likely to have already done, and one of my jobs was to fill in the blanks. I know I spent a lot of time at my home-made stand-up drawing board laying up the Journal of Ferrocement, working on those drawings — and thrashing Pink Floyd and Warren Zevon. But looking down the list, I’d be surprised if we filled in all the blanks.
What else? I wrote a Guide for the Construction of Ferrocement Hulls, 17 pages including the typical detail index. It reads more like instructions than a guide, but it’s certainly practical in its abbreviated way, and includes a few hard-won “recommendations”, such as:
It is recommended that deck shuttering be set up before starting armature to avoid chips and sawdust in the mesh.
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One afternoon, as I was working at my drawing board and grooving to the music, I got a phone call from our friend Hugh. He was a good draughtsman and had done a little detail work for us, but couldn’t stand the tedium. He and his wife had bought an old villa on a fairly steep section in Parnell, and Hugh was working on the timber foundations. Sounding rather anxious, he said he needed help, and could I please come over — so I did, and found him under the house. He’d built up stacks of wooden blocks on the sloping ground to hold the place up while he replaced the dodgy stumps with new ones, and he was concerned that some of the taller stacks were looking a bit wobbly — as if they might teeter just a bit more and the house slide down into the gully.
Given that in my memory, or imagination, those stacks of blocks were so tall we could stand upright on the downhill side — and with some of the old structure removed they did look wobbly, and we were with them under the house — maybe the sensible thing to do would have been to make sure the wife and kids weren’t inside, and leave it to someone who knew what they were doing. But having learnt a bit about structures and self-confidence from Brian and others, we used the new sub floor timber, which had already been delivered, to prop it up, brace it, stabilise it — and felt retrospectively relieved and pleased with ourselves.
Hugh was a talented creative. For my birthday he gave me a bread board carved to show a section through a woman’s body, just above the pubis, showing the curve of her belly and buttocks. On another day we found him stretched out on the floor painting different aspects of the old villa’s ornate skirting boards in contrasting colours. No wonder he found drawing our typical details tedious.
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I also designed a nice letterhead, and we started advertising in the Journal from April/May 1975. After that, with the company set up, we started advertising in its name, but made the mistake of not including Brian’s name.
We did say, however, that we offered a custom design service as well as construction, repairs, grouting etc.
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Finally, with the help of my one year’s legal education I wrote a price list and one page order form that required cash with order, and carefully stipulated that the drawings remained our property, could only be used to build one boat, and could not be modified or departed from without our consent.
Return on investment
So how did sales go? That’s something else I don’t remember, but if you told me we sold nothing at all I wouldn’t be surprised. Certainly, clearing the mail wasn’t very exciting. I don’t know how many catalogues we ordered, how many we mailed out, or where the remainder went.
Although there were four contracts in my binder, the one that got used was for hire of the grout pump. At the very least, paying a refundable deposit meant that people looked after it, and cleaned the bloody thing! How we inherited the pump goes in with the other “don’t remembers”. Brian did no new custom design work over this period, at least not through the company, and we did no new builds.
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We eventually added Brian’s 28′ scow to our portfolio of designs, and it also featured in the last issue of the Journal that we published before it moved on to IFIC (the International Ferrocement Information Center in Bangkok), including a characteristic comment from Brian, that the scow demonstrated
what can be done if the type of yacht produced by the rating rules is abandoned as the be-all and end-all of pleasure boat design, and, instead, rational use of economical modern materials is combined with traditional hull forms, rigs and so on. One problem is that much of traditional boating expertise is fading into the past. However, the necessary information is readily available from the library, even if it is not part of the prospective builder’s personal experience, and New Zealand Ferrocement Services Ltd, who supply the plans, provide details of fittings such as the rudder, centreboard and case, davits, windlass, mast and rigging fittings and so on, in addition to the basic working drawings.
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On the other hand
Fortunately there was plenty going on in other directions. The best in terms of bringing in cash was the work I was doing with Dennis Broad.
When I write about the remarkable people who managed to successfully build and sail their boats, it’s people like Dennis who come to mind. He was straightforward, intelligent, good natured and hard-working. Maybe I just never knew him well enough to discover anything to dislike. A diesel mechanic by trade, he seemed able to turn his hand to pretty much anything. Just as I deferred to Brian in all areas designed-related, I reckoned the best thing to do with Dennis was to follow his lead.
A lot of the work we did together has faded in my memory — I was too preoccupied with my drawing board and typewriter — but I know Dennis did a lot of work on our boat at Ambler Avenue, as I have photographs of him working on it and none of me.
We bought an old van to hold our gear, so rusty that if you slammed a door too hard you felt the body might come adrift from the chassis. It was generally parked at our place since Dennis and Nancy were by then living aboard their boat.
We worked on Graeme Kenyon‘s Herreshoff too, and on another hull for an amiable young dentist in Glendene. I remember him saying he preferred his patients to have pain killer because that made it easier for him to work on their mouths. He sounded a bit like a road worker with a jackhammer.
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I’m sure we also worked on boat repairs at Ship Builders in St Mary’s Bay, not that I can remember much about it, but it became an important learning experience later in the Solomons, when we came to launch our first tuna catcher boat, the Solomon Warrior. It had already been in the water for a while, but we had to bring it back up the slipway so the Prime Minister, the foreign aid and embassy people, the local dignitaries and pretty much everybody from our staff, the cannery, the marine base and the local villages could see it blessed and launched in the traditional manner. It was going to be quite a do.
Unfortunately someone was a little careless with the supporting blocks when she was hauled out the day before, and the result was an undignified compression fracture in the bilges. I wasn’t sure which was the worst job, but decided I’d squirm down into the bilges and hold a sledgehammer against the hull on the inside, like an anvil, while poor Frank on the outside smashed the plaster out of the armature with a second sledge. We repaired it with a quick dry mix and had it repainted and anti fouled ready for the next day’s ceremony. No sweat, just like new, but quite stressful.
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One job we never landed was sheathing Friedensriech Hundertwasser’s boat Regentag in ferrocement. We’d met the famous artist through Brian at an NZFCMA meeting and socialised with him a bit. I suppose we thought that had us in with a chance. Anyway, we tried. We drew plans for the job. We submitted a bill. We weren’t paid. We were resentful.
We did such a lot of work, Heather says, drew plans, did calculations, drove up to his place in the Bay of Islands to — what? Present our work? I can’t recall, but I do vaguely remember a bit of a walk in from the road, next to mangroves, and being met by a woman. That’s it. No sign of Frederick. Heather remembers it was freezing cold and the toilet was almost an outhouse — a rather unpleasant recycling arrangement of some sort. As Frederick himself said,
For only he who honours his own waste and re-uses it in a waste-free society transforms death into life and has the right to live on this earth.1
Perhaps I don’t remember the toilet because I didn’t need it, or, you know, there were the mangroves. We drove home, no work eventuated, and in the best Donovan tradition we never chased up on the unpaid bill.
Frederick designed a public toilet in Kawakawa that became a tourist attraction. You absolutely had to take a leak there when passing through. I duly did, years ago, but didn’t like the fact that, beautiful as it was, shallow puddles formed on the tiled toilet floor, just like they did on the roof of Graeme’s EH Holden.
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A few years later we were at a family wedding. It was a teetotal affair, and between the ceremony and the reception we snuck off to the pub with another couple, who were living in the Bay of Islands. They turned out to be Frederick’s neighbours, who said they’d notice women get off the bus at their neighbour’s place, and then, later, see them catch the bus back out. Maybe they were put off by the cold and the toilet.
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Two interesting postscripts to that. The Regentag was finally sheathed in 1999, but in 2022 many cracks and leaks were found in the ferrocement and “the entire underwater hull” had to be covered with an epoxy resin laminate.
Also, a brief article in what was to be our last issue of the Journal describes the Klaraborg, a schooner built in Sweden in the 1850s, and originally a Baltic trader, having had a ferrocement “patch” applied to replace 12′ of timber sheathing each side of her bow. In recent years she’d been sailing the world, and we later met her crew in the Solomons, where she rode out a hurricane in our harbour. She sank off Western Australia without loss of life in 1982.
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Graeme has a photograph of Dennis using Graeme’s EH Holden as a scaffold and attacking the stern of a Hartley boat with a sledge hammer. You’d have to ask Graeme why. He says his station wagon made a good scaffold, but after that it carried puddles whenever it rained.
Our strangest job, on reflection, was building a ferrocement slide for a local council in West Auckland. I don’t know whose weird idea that was, but we built the thing.
Every time I think of a kid using it, I imagine them snagging their bottom on a stray piece of wire. Unsurprisingly, it’s now gone and I can’t even remember where it was erected.
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After Tikitere was completed Dennis and Nancy invited us for a sail across to the Coromandel. She was a beautiful boat, a real accomplishment, and they were, as I like to put it, real good people. I used a photo I took on that cruise for the cover of our Catalogue and another, when she was launched, for one of the Journal Handbooks. It was also memorable because Heather required a visit to Coromandel Hospital along the way.
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New directions
The other person I owed a lot to, and even more than I realised at the time, was Gary Bowen. Gary, Mary and their two girls were Americans who’d been our neighbours at Span Farm. They too were among those who built their dream and sailed away.
Gary was a lecturer in Civil Engineering at Auckland University, and my story — or excuse for my failings — used to be that academics like him, and faux academics like me, lacked the real world skills that people like Dennis had. Rather like the American woman who’d just graduated with a Masters in English Literature when Covid hit, and found herself locked down without knowing how to cook for herself.
Well, if academia was a disadvantage, Gary certainly made up for it.
There’s no point repeating what I’ve written in a separate post about NZFCMA and the Journal of Ferrocement, where Gary was joint editor with me, but he was very proactive.
Basically, his efforts took the Journal in an academic and commercial direction, and away from the amateur boatbuilding fraternity, as a quick look at the makeup of the 1976 Editorial Board — or our Tables of Contents — will indicate.
But the amateur audience had become stagnant anyway, with the ferrocement boom already in decline, and what Gary gave us in its place was academic and commercial credibility. One consequence was the Journal finding a new home at IFIC. Another was an enquiry from Jerry Breekveldt, an Auckland marine architect.
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Jerry Breekveldt’s practice was completely different from Brian’s in a few ways. He designed primarily work boats like tugs, fishing boats and so on, primarily built in steel, and his clients were generally established interests like fishermen, port companies, boat builders and so on. He also had good relations with government agencies like the Marine Department and Foreign Affairs.
Jerry had been commissioned by Foreign Affairs to design a tuna fishing boat for an aid project in the Solomon Islands. The project was to establish a home grown fishing industry in the Solomons, with the attendant benefits of export earnings and sustainable exploitation of the tuna fishery. Plus there would be lots of job and training opportunities for Solomon Islanders from both the building and fishing operations. There were already pole-and-line “catcher boats” in Solomons waters but they were operated by Okinawan crews. The idea was to build ten similar boats in ferrocement and man them with local crews. A nearby cannery operated by the Japanese fishing company Taiyo would process the catch. Finance was to come from the Asian Development Bank and technical expertise on the building side from NZ Foreign Aid.
Jerry was contracted to do the design work, but he had two unusual problems. First, he knew little or nothing about pole-and-line fishing boats, although this was the lesser problem because the brief was simply to copy the existing Okinawan boats. Jerry also knew nothing about ferrocement, favoured for the same reason it was by amateur boatbuilders — that much of the construction work was “unskilled”. Hence the buzz words of the times, “appropriate technology”. That led in turn — I assume, since I wasn’t involved — to Jerry approaching the University Engineering Department, and so Gary Bowen, for advice. David Eyres from the Ministry of Transport’s Marine Division would have been involved and he was on Gary’s editorial board.
I wish I had access to the correspondence and drawings, but I’m left with the murky recesses of memory, so I don’t know how the arrangement worked between Gary, Jerry and Brian Donovan. I doubt very much that there was any contact between Jerry and Brian, but I find it equally hard to imagine that Brian wasn’t involved, even if just through informal consultation. Jerry would have done the actual construction drawings.
Next question — who was to oversee construction of the ferrocement hulls? Again, there was no one in the established marine industry, or at least no one prepared to abandon their job for a time-limited contract. So my name was proposed, I put my hopeful hand up and, to my surprise, got the job. That was the beginning of my association with two more real good men — Jerry Breekveldt and Trevor Holmes, the newly appointed project manager.
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Trevor Holmes was the archetypal bluff Yorkshireman, tall, beefy, red-faced and confident. With his demeanour and booming voice he was more than a bit like Brian, although I can’t imagine those two egos getting along. Trevor’s background was in the UK cod fishery, where he’d managed a fish processing plant in Hull. He could, and would, rhapsodise about cod and fish fingers, but this was towards the end of the years-long Cod Wars, a series of confrontations between the UK and Iceland over fishing rights in the North Atlantic. They ended in victory for Iceland, a devastating effect on northern UK fishing ports like Hull, and thousands of fishermen and people in related trades out of work. On our little island in the Solomons alone there were three refugees from the northern ports.
Trevor and his niece Pat, who was going to accompany him, stopped off in Auckland to meet Jerry on his way to take up his new job. Heather and I had lunch with them and Jerry at the Parnell Rose Gardens. Pat was a good foil for Trevor, quiet and agreeable. They were amazed by what they’d seen coming in from the airport, all the little stand-alone wooden houses, looking so temporary after built-up brick Britain. Their northern accents were quite unlike my Lancashire grandparents but equally engaging, and they were good company — a relief since we would be two years in close proximity on a small island, and I wasn’t certain that Heather would be coming with me. What I saw of Jerry was encouraging too — a real professional but a gentleman too.
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This meant winding up my affairs in New Zealand, which in some senses wasn’t hard. The work with Dennis was episodic, the Journal baton had already been passed to IFIC, and Graeme Kenyon agreed to check the company mail box. As long as Heather was in New Zealand he could access my drawings etc at Ambler Ave. When she did leave for the Solomons near the end of the year, Jeff Carthew moved into the house and the arrangement continued. But it wasn’t much of an imposition. The truth is the company was dormant, and in commercial terms a failure.
If I don’t recall who the shareholders were in New Zealand Ferrocement Services when the company was set up, I certainly don’t remember what happened after I left. There’s nothing available online before the mid 1990s, and precious little afterwards. What rather staggered me was finding that it wasn’t wound up until 2002, with Joe Buckton as sole director! We’d met Joe as a pleasant young family man building a Donovan design, the Tamure, and working as caretaker at the beautiful new Tawharanui regional park east of Warkworth.
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I started this post talking about my mixed feelings — excitement at what I wanted to do for Brian, and now guilt for walking away. I’d badly wanted to work with him, and — being hardly a model of financial acumen — must have thought there’d be a dollar in it, just as I thought there might be a dollar in it when I took over publishing the Journal of Ferrocement. I was wrong in both cases, but Brian was our hero, and there were other reasons why we wanted him to do as well as Richard Hartley.
Still, there’s no denying that if that’s where it started, it ended with me walking away — to a good job, a better understanding of my strengths and weaknesses, and resolve, if possible, to never work again without getting paid.
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I hope you will take this page and the following as tributes to Brian, but perhaps the best and clearest expressions of our feelings for him came when he died. Graeme Kenyon badly wanted to get his designs and drawings into the Maritime Museum for safe keeping. Some of the family were resistant, thinking they might have a commercial value, and the Museum insisted on their written agreement.
Graeme was taken aback when Alan Mummery, a yacht designer who’d got on well with Brian, said that, since they were custom designs for one-off builds, and they therefore had no value, what was the point of saving them?
Graeme thought they had artistic value, the life’s work of a creative, idiosyncratic, practically-minded man, and he didn’t want Brian or his work to be simply forgotten.
And Gary Bowen wrote:
Brian “invested” in me. He saw my worth and potential much better than I did. The person I am today I owe very much to Brian. Everything was “easy”. It wasn’t, of course, but you had to believe it because if you didn’t, you would not have had the courage to try. His constant encouragement was important to all of us who made it to sea in our boats.
Postscripts
1. The remaining stock design yachts
2. STOCK DESIGNS FOR FERROCEMENT
Introduced by B.W. Donovan
The following is Brian’s introduction to the Stock Design Catalogue and the company’s details of service. A few typos removed.
These designs are a selection from a large number drawn up over several years work with ferrocement.
This introduction outlines the design philosophy which I have followed in the planning of these vessels and describes in general terms the construction methods employed.
Design considerations
Pleasure craft. As with all types of boat, yachts and launches must be carefully planned for their intended purpose. A vessel may be intended for coastal work or to cross oceans, as a weekender or for life afloat. These and other differences in basic function, as modified by the experience of the client and architect, will result in entirely different craft.
Cruising yachts are among the most interesting commissions. A compromise must always be established between their functions as a mode of transport and as a home. Although long ocean passages (for example) have been undertaken in all types of craft, many boats which have been successful in the ocean crossing have at the same time fallen down in other respects. The boat may not have had suitable plumbing arrangements. Complicated equipment may have failed. Perhaps the berth arrangements did not give sufficient privacy.
Although a cruiser should not be slow and cumbersome, then, neither should she fatigue her crew, and she should supply comfort when the stress of weather is against it.
There is a tendency to short-rig a cruiser, although I do not know why. There should be the ability to reduce sail rapidly and with the least effort. Since there is not generally a lot of manpower available, the gear should be designed with this in mind and simplicity may not always be the answer. She should be able to work to windward under reduced sail and be able to handle the draft limits of her cruising waters. She should not draw a large quarter wave and should have buoyant ends.
How suitable is ferrocement as a building material? At present it is very heavy, and a 20mm (¾”) thick panel will weigh about 50 kg/m2 (10lb/ft2) without any allowance for the weight of keel, floors, frames and so on. It is very difficult to get below 20mm and impossible on larger vessels, although hulls of 13mm (½”) and even slightly less have been built successfully. Some would say that this is an unanswerable argument against the material, but the influence of increased displacement on the performance of yachts is not necessarily bad.
The primary requirement for speed in displacement craft is not light weight but low wetted surface and low windage, with sufficient lateral plane to combat leeway (assuming that sail area is sufficient, and efficient). A heavy yacht is steadier in her motion, but she will be wetter when driven hard. She will sail at a much less angle of heel, but will be harder on her gear. She will not give to puffs of wind or shoot ahead as a light yacht will, but she will have much more room, and can carry more of everything, including stores, while at the same time allowing more variety in the layout of the accommodation compared with a light craft of the same linear dimensions.
Launches.
There has been comparatively little interest in the use of ferrocement in launches.
Two are illustrated in this catalogue, of very different types. Timu is a light, fast, 9.1m (30′) Sport Fisherman, while Tamure is a traditional displacement cruising launch of slightly lower overall length. It is a mystery why more of the latter type of craft are not designed and built in ferrocement, since the material is probably better suited to this type than to any other kind of pleasure boat.
Commercial vessels. Commercial designs do not lend themselves so easily to presentation as stock plans since they are usually custom designed, or at least modifications from a basic design to suit the needs of a particular client. The small selection here are all relatively small craft capable of meeting a variety of needs and circumstances. Some of them are of types no longer often seen in the “Western” world, but which still play a vital role in the economies of the developing nations. Karere, for example, is a 12.2m (40′) auxiliary ketch designed for the carriage of small cargoes and a few passengers between islands or on coastal trade. She is capable of quick, economical construction, is of heavy displacement for cargo-carrying and has a simple sail plan to assist the engine in passage-making. The Indonesian 12.5m (41′) fishing boat is designed to meet the need for an economical vessel in developing countries.
She has a very easily driven hull, requiring very little power to drive it, and only minimal accommodation.
Paruparu, in contrast, is a modern type of small fishing boat suitable for pelagic trawling or long-lining, with accommodation in Western style for a crew or owner-operators who expect reasonable comfort. Ellimek is a small general-purpose launch which could also be fitted out for one-man fishing if desired.
Ferrocement is a material well-suited to commercial vessels provided there is proper attention to design detail to enable the vessel to stand up to the rigours of hard use. Those who have an interest in designs for commercial applications are invited to write stating their requirements.
Construction methods
All hulls are designed to be built upright over temporary wood moulds. Although often used quite satisfactorily, frames are not a necessity in ferrocement boats since the shell acts as a stressed membrane which carries within itself the elements necessary to absorb loads from internal or externally-applied forces. In these designs frames are used (if at all) as grounds for the fitting of bulkheads etc.
All the hulls are designed to be built on an integral steel keel shoe which supports the frames and armature during construction and protects the keel in service.
The shells are reinforced with both longitudinal and transverse steel and all integral structures such as frames and engine beds are fabricated on starter rods which form a mechanical tie into the hull. Extra steel is incorporated in high stress areas such as at the sheer, around openings and in the bilges. The stern tube and rudder tube are of mild steel welded into the stern bars.
All vessels require floors, but in almost all these boats the cabin sole also is a structural member. In combination with the keel and the floors (which act as spacers) this whole structure forms a large girder through the bottom of the vessel which acts to resist longitudinal distortion. At rest in calm water the weight of ballast, fuel, water and so on puts the sole in compression and the keel in tension, while the reverse occurs when the vessel is slipped or grounded. In rough water the condition will alternate as hogging and sagging occurs.
The structural sole reduces the need for floors and the large spaces formed can be used as tanks for fuel, water and waste. (The tanks must be sealed to protect the hull from contact with the stored liquids.) The system of integral tanks also acts as a double bottom to prevent flooding in the event of the hull being holed in the under-sole area. The maximum tank space is obtained and the great weight of fuel and water is kept low in the keel where it has a beneficial effect on stability. In all these designs the keel is kept reasonably wide. Besides providing space for fuel and water, and enabling low placement of the engine, this greatly facilitates construction of the keel, since laying up and tying the armature is much speeded if both sides of the shell are accessible. Plastering is also made easier.
Two-shot plastering is favoured strongly over the one-shot method. This means that the outer surface of the hull is plastered and cured before stripping the mould and applying mortar to the inside. This minimises the crisis aspect of plastering which results from the enormous amount of work which has to be done to one-shot plaster a hull in one day. It therefore makes a sound, workmanlike job much easier to attain.
The various building methods developed for on-off amateur construction are described and analysed in detail in “The Ferrocement Yacht: An introduction” available from this company.
Costs. Undoubtedly there is more wishful thinking in the field of cost estimation than in any other aspect of amateur boatbuilding. There is no substitute, of course, for realistic assessments of material, labour and equipment costs, but there can still be an enormous difference between what a boat can cost if you let it and what it need cost.
Over recent years the aesthetics of yacht design has been over-whelmed by the power of advertising. It is true that there is a type of boat that does not look right without all the shiny “bolt-on” gear which we see in the magazines, but the true beauty of any boat is in its basic form, in the sweep of the sheer, the proportions of the cabin trunk or deck-house, the position of deadlights, the visual effect of beltings and so on, as well as the efficiency with which the boat and its gear perform the function for which they were intended.
There is much room for economising in the proper choice of materials and in the design and selection of fittings and equipment. As one example the vessels in this catalogue make wide use of mild steel fittings which can be manufactured by any competent machine shop. Stern tube and rudder gland come into this category, as do many deck fittings such as the stem roller, pulpits, stanchions and winch bases. The reader should price these fittings in bronze or stainless steel for the vessel he is considering and note the opportunity for saving! Properly protected these fittings will give no maintenance trouble, and be more reliable than the often mis-applied stainless steel. Mild steel has the added advantage of being very close to the hull reinforcing on the galvanic scale.
Quality.
The ability of a vessel to stand up to the long years of hard work which should be expected of her depends on the construction detail which goes into her building. Unsuitable structural systems, improper selection of materials and equipment, poor attachment details, incorrect wiring, substandard painting, inadequate beltings and cappings can all rob a ferrocement hull of years of service.
We have been keen observers of ferrocement boats in service over the years and particular care has been taken to ensure that the design detail incorporated in these vessels is of the highest standard. These requirements are fully covered in the plans and specifications.
Details of Service
1) All design packages include complete working drawings, plus necessary detail drawings of custom fittings required for the particular vessel. Written specifications cover further details of hull construction, fitting out, installation of machinery and equipment, painting etc. The stock plan price covers consultation and advice by letter, but not personal supervision.
2) Additional drawings or modifications to the stock design may be furnished by the Architects as time and other commitments permit, but these will be charged to the client on a time basis. No departures from the architects’ drawings and specifications may be made without the written consent of New Zealand Ferrocement Services Ltd.
3) New Zealand Ferrocement Services Ltd provides a custom design service for both commercial and pleasure craft. This is, of course, a more expensive arrangement than stock plans since the client must stand the entire cost of developing the design, but it does ensure a vessel suited to the owner’s needs where these cannot be met by a stock design. Enquiries about modifications to stock designs and the preparation of custom designs are welcomed.
4) Clients may arrange inspections of their vessel at suitable stages during construction on payment of an inspection fee plus travel and accommodation costs where applicable. Certification that the ferrocement structure of the craft has been built to the Architect’s specifications will assist arrangement of insurance and boost resale value. This service is normally available only in the North Island of New Zealand and at adequate notice.
Enquiries are welcome.