The maintenance-free sailboat ?!?

[Russell Turpin]

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Sailboats are maintenance-intensive. Of course, every sailor
enjoys working on their boat second only to sailing it. Of
course. We nonetheless curse when the designer or manufacturer
builds in a little extra maintenance where we think less would be
ideal. And owners decry the devaluation of boats owned more than
a few years, which comes largely from the need to then replace or
upgrade dozens of systems.

I would enjoy a discussion of ideas on how to design and build a
sailboat that requires less long-term maintenance. Let me start
the thread with some obvious ideas.

o No outside teak. (Eliminates most brightwork maintenance.)

o Stayless rig. (Eliminates tuning, inspection, and
maintenance of standing rigging. Usually simplifies
sailplan. Note that this need not be high-tech carbon
fiber; unstayed masts of other materials have been used
with less aggressive sailplans.)

o Aluminum hull. (Only anti-foulant paint is needed on the
exterior, and grounding on rock won't gouge the keel. Paying
-- in mega-BUC's -- for copper-nickel eliminates even bottom
paint and worry about electrolysis.)

All of these ideas compromise material costs, aesthetics, or
performance. This should be expected: whenever one looks to
maximize one design criterion, the others get compromised. It is
still a good exercise to look at the extremes. (Racing forces
designers to extremes along one axis: performance.)

So: post your ideas! How do we make the engine and drive more
robust? What about the head?

Russell
--
An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that
there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that
the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence
on the werewolf question. -- John McCarthy