Good morning everyone! It's time to gather round again for our weekly gathering talking about what's going on in your home. There's a great group of professionals, amateurs, and newbies who read this and can answer most any question you have. This is boatgeek hosting from the future again. Grab a cup of coffee or tea and join me for a piece about
boats.
The company I work for designs boats, mostly commercial, mostly between 50 and 250 feet long. We do a lot of smallish (70-120 feet) tugboats, and a lot of fishing boats. The picture below is a 58-foot boat that will fish up and down the West Coast when it's built. It might catch
squid in California, Dungeness crab off Oregon or Washington, or king crab in Alaska.
What you see in the picture is all of the structural parts of the boat. We made a 3D model of the boat and can set up the software to give cutting instructions to computer-controlled cutting machine that turns a plate into dozens of pieces. The shipyard effectively gets a 1500-piece
puzzle delivered to their loading dock. All it takes is a welder and the 100 pages of assembly drawings to put the thing together.
Boat design is a study in tradeoffs. The first thing you lose is all personal space. This boat will fish with 4-6 people berthed in two cabins. The total living space (excluding the engine room and the pilothouse) is about 400 square feet. The rest of the boat goes to fuel, fish holds, and machinery spaces. With that little space, everything has to be efficiently designed. And finally, everything has to go to sea, encounter loads as bad as a major earthquake, and keep going.
Since everyone's interested in maximizing the usable square footage of their house, there's a few ideas from our design office you might be able to use if you're planning something new. None of these are new to us, but they might help. You might remember Milly Watt talking about how much
space the stairways take up in a house. If you can stack a stair way going up above a stairway going down, you can save a lot of space. Stairways are such a big design issue for us that we almost always lay them in the drawings before anything else. It's also helpful to put bathrooms and kitchens close to one another so that the plumbing can go straight up and down without having to take up overhead space or wall space for the big drain pipe. A final challenge for us is getting enough storage, so we tuck lockers and cabinets in anywhere we can. There aren't as many odd-shaped spaces left over in a typical house as on a
boat, but there are usually spaces you can convert to shelving or cabinets.
As long as I have the soapbox here, I'd like to put in a plug for marine transportation. Many of you have probably heard the rail industry's ad about moving a ton of freight 400 miles on a gallon of diesel. While that's 4 times the efficiency of trucks, it's only about a third of the
efficiency of a modern tug-barge combination. The big container ships are far more efficient yet. One other benefit is that all boats trading directly between US ports or fishing in US waters have to be built and owned in the US. So the little tug helping the big ship into the harbor
cost about $5-10 million to build, not to mention operating costs. Most of that money is spent on workers somewhere in this country.
And finally, I'll leave with some more boat pictures. I led or had significant input on all of these projects, although the task of making them look good is someone else's job. I'm good at boxes, not so much at grace and
style.
Please give CodeTalker some special mojo for posting this up. I'll be around for a little while after 8:30 Pacific time, and also later in the day.