Sacrilege

User avatar
BOAT
Admiral
Posts: 4967
Joined: Fri Oct 19, 2012 5:12 pm
Sailboat: MacGregor 26M
Location: Oceanside, CA MACMJ213 2013 ETEC60

Re: Sacrilege

Post by BOAT »

there is so much windage I think it might get blown backwards trying to tack.
User avatar
Steve K
Captain
Posts: 703
Joined: Fri Jan 09, 2004 7:35 am
Sailboat: MacGregor 26D
Location: So. Cal. desert

Re: Sacrilege

Post by Steve K »

I just wish they would build an in-between sized monohull sailboat.

Of course my preference would be a MacGregor 31, or so, D :wink:

Imagine, the 26D weighs 1600 and something pounds. A 31D would still be trailerable and probably be an incredible performer (especially if they didn't make it too much more beamy). And my old Honda 8hp four stroke would probably still be a good enough kicker for it. The 32 to 34 foot mast could still be raised pretty easily. The boat would, likely be able to have a little more head room inside.
They could design in a new piercing bow, which would make this new model look very modern. And I just have a hunch it would be very fast.

So come on, why not Tattoo people :?:
I've now seen many MacGregor owners leave this site..... why?.......... no place to go for an upgrade, except to another brand, unless you're going all the way to a 70 footer.

I've asked this question several times over the years and the MacGregor/Sharp family just doesn't see it, I guess.
Of course, they are the marketing millionaires and I'm just an old retired warehouse guy.
But I have to say, I've had dreams of sailing my Mac/Tattoo 31D and it was a blast :!: :) :wink:

Best Breezes,
Steve K.
Mac 26D "Three Sheets"
User avatar
Russ
Admiral
Posts: 7543
Joined: Thu Oct 11, 2007 12:01 pm
Sailboat: MacGregor 26M
Location: Bozeman, Montana "Luna Azul" 2008 M 70hp Suzi

Re: Sacrilege

Post by Russ »

Chopper Pilot wrote:Poor fellow..., I guess I will call this one "Tesla"
It has 78" from floor to roof

Image
Image

Okay, now that's cool

Wonder if it would get up on plane. Mast needs to be much taller and you wouldn't need water ballast.

BTW, this guy dropped his price to $95k. Still insane price for that thing, unless you are nostalgic for a boat owned by Roger himself.
http://www.sailboatlistings.com/view/29060
User avatar
Russ
Admiral
Posts: 7543
Joined: Thu Oct 11, 2007 12:01 pm
Sailboat: MacGregor 26M
Location: Bozeman, Montana "Luna Azul" 2008 M 70hp Suzi

Re: Sacrilege

Post by Russ »

Sorry, there are plenty of excellent cats out there with lots of room on them. The Mac 36 isn't one of them.
User avatar
BOAT
Admiral
Posts: 4967
Joined: Fri Oct 19, 2012 5:12 pm
Sailboat: MacGregor 26M
Location: Oceanside, CA MACMJ213 2013 ETEC60

Re: Sacrilege

Post by BOAT »

RussMT wrote:Sorry, there are plenty of excellent cats out there with lots of room on them. The Mac 36 isn't one of them.
Another weird looking boat.
User avatar
mastreb
Admiral
Posts: 3927
Joined: Wed Feb 09, 2011 9:00 am
Sailboat: MacGregor 26M
Location: Cardiff by the Sea, CA ETEC-60 "Luna Sea"
Contact:

Re: Sacrilege

Post by mastreb »

I'm just really happy that I can toss out crazy ideas and other people will do the cad modeling :-)

Roger MacGregor watched the trailerable Hobie 33 fail dismally in the market. It was an excellent, fast boat that meets most people's ideal of "the largest possible trailer sailer" although it did have a non-retractable fin/bulb keel and so stood very tall on its trailer.

These kinds of things tend to affect businessmen in a rather permanent fashion. He no doubt decided that the market he wanted to serve, which consists generally of people who don't want to pay for a slip, and are therefore value conscious, won't pay twice the cost of a 26 for a 33. He also knows that boat cost goes up and down by the pound, not by the linear foot, which is why a boat that's less than twice as long costs 5X the money.

I've done a bit of spreadsheet math on the costs to build a boat design I'd like to do, and the bottom line is there's just no way to make it inexpensive without staying small or without a revolution in materials similar to the difference between planking and fiberglass.

90% of boats on the market of any type cost between $20 and $30 per pound from cheap to luxury. $25/lb. is about what a bespoke build will cost you. Price any boat you want, divide it's true cost to buy by its displacement, and you'll see how consistent this number is.

Macs/tattoos weigh in at $10/lb. That's less than half of the cost of any competitors of any type. Roger locked up the value conscious end of the market, Tattoo isn't leaving it, and for that reason, they aren't going to make a costly boat.

When you move up "a notch" from 26', you have to jump to a whole different level of "Big Boat" hardware. It's that line that Roger decided not to cross, and that's why the boats are limited to 26' where they're quite frankly a little under spec and most of us wind up uprigging them as we go. It's a good idea.

A 33' boat has to use the same hardware as my 38', and that stuff is all 5X the cost of the same hardware sized for the 26'. There's really no interstitial sizes for this stuff. The '65/'70 foot boats are at the maximum size for the "medium sized boat hardware" for the same reason.

A 33' trailerable boat with decent build quality and respectable sailing performance is going to weigh what a Seaward 32RK weighs: 8300 lbs. Even at "MacGregor" build prices (i.e., pushing value and building in larger volumes than anybody else), that's $83K. The Seaward is right at that $20/lb. mark for the boat.

Nobody in the trailerable market is going to pay that for a boat. At that price, you can also afford a slip, and if you're going to get a slip, you might as well get a boat that makes it worthwhile.

Anyway, that's the business logic of it.

Now, that said, these are only true for Bermuda rigs, because the mast has to get taller to loft the necessary amount of sail, and the engineering loads go up by the cube, not linearly.

If you've got multiple, shorter masts in a schooner or ketch rig, then you really could stick to that $10/lb. price point. Weld those two MacGregors together for-to-aft rather than side-to-side, and you've got a boat that actually will sail just fine.

ChopperPilot?
User avatar
Chopper Pilot
Engineer
Posts: 142
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2013 11:10 pm
Sailboat: MacGregor 26M
Location: Washington D.C. area 2013 Macgregor 26M 70HP Suzuki " The AirBender"

Re: Sacrilege

Post by Chopper Pilot »

I would use old boats of the same model that have depreciated a lot of the value independently. This should knock that cost per pound down to1/4th the cost. Then add the center and cut out the insides of the hull. That will leave half of the money left over for rigging. It would be a fun challenge to see if one could purchase two old used 26M's and see if it could be put together and rigged for the cost of a new one.

Image
Image
User avatar
mastreb
Admiral
Posts: 3927
Joined: Wed Feb 09, 2011 9:00 am
Sailboat: MacGregor 26M
Location: Cardiff by the Sea, CA ETEC-60 "Luna Sea"
Contact:

Re: Sacrilege

Post by mastreb »

Well, this worked:

Image

And the 60' catamaran made out of re-used (not recycled) 2-litter coke bottles crossed the Pacific in 128 days.

http://features.boats.com/boat-content/ ... our-world/

So I'd say whatever floats your boat!
User avatar
BOAT
Admiral
Posts: 4967
Joined: Fri Oct 19, 2012 5:12 pm
Sailboat: MacGregor 26M
Location: Oceanside, CA MACMJ213 2013 ETEC60

Re: Sacrilege

Post by BOAT »

Yeah, and Tesla wanted to make a 'death ray' but shooting radio waves and also thought that electricity could distributed to houses through the air.

Back to reality,

Everything changes when it's YOUR money. It's easy to tell the factory to build you a boat but are you really willing to pay the price for that boat? All the things that Matt said are true thus making a 33 foot boat about twice as expensive to build as a 26 foot boat but there is still ANOTHER cost factor Matt did not mention that will drive up the price even higher:

Economies of scale:

Another reason MAC's are cheap is because of VOLUME. Roger spends 28 thousand dollars a week on labor, benefits, and maintenance NO MATTER HOW MANY BOATS HE BUILDS IN A DAY!

His labor is a FIXED COST! He must pay those guys the same amount no matter how many boats they build. To keep the factory open he needs that 28 grand per week.

If Roger builds ONE boat a week his labor cost for that ONE boat is 28 grand! If Roger builds TWO boats a week his labor cost for those TWO boats is still 28 grand so that's 14 grand in labor per boat.

If Roger builds THREE boats a week and his labor costs are still 28 grand per week but for three boats that's only 9 grand per boat.

You can see here how Rogers cost per boat can go down dramatically if he keeps up a high production schedule - at his peak when Roger was making two boats per DAY you can see how his profits soared:

At 10 boats per week with a fixed labor cost of 28 grand per week Roger's labor cost per boat would be 2800 dollars per boat! And THAT IS HOW YOUR MAC GOT SO CHEAP!! NOT because Roger cut corners or created a lousy boat! On the contrary, if the boat was lousy the whole thing would have never worked! Without that VOLUME and economies of scale the MAC as you enjoy it would have never happened.

By building only ONE boat, THAT was the secret. Adding another boat to the line would have doubled all the fixed costs and the whole thing fails.

based on the ACTUAL REAL demand for a 33 foot MacGregor I suspect the cost to buy would be around 60 to 80 grand - and as Matt said - it's just not worth it.

My fear is that Captain Victor is going through the same math regarding his wheel pilot for the MAC and another great idea might not make it to market because "Great Ideas Need Great Management" or nothing happens! I hope that is not the case for Captain Victor but based on the number of buyers here I can't see how he makes any profit. I hope he raises his price so we can get a product soon if that is the case. His idea seems like a really good one to me, but even great ideas can't go to market if the math does not work.

And that is why Tesla FAILED. It's not my opinion, it's just the way things are.
User avatar
mastreb
Admiral
Posts: 3927
Joined: Wed Feb 09, 2011 9:00 am
Sailboat: MacGregor 26M
Location: Cardiff by the Sea, CA ETEC-60 "Luna Sea"
Contact:

Re: Sacrilege

Post by mastreb »

I honestly think the next "right" boat is smaller, not larger. Here's why:

Kayaks are made of Linear low density polyethylene plastic. It's an extremely strong, very durable, and very light (lighter than water) material. Dyneema/amsteel is made of the same stuff. It's also what Pelican cases are made of.

A Kayak's blank hull costs about $20 is materials >and labor< to make. But it costs almost $500 in rotomolding machine time to build at larger sizes. For an 18' long hull, you're talking about a $5M rotomolding machine that will build about 10,000 hulls in its service life. That's $500 per hull of machine cost. Prices drop dramatically as the LWL gets shorter because smaller rotomolding machines are much cheaper.

The largest rotomolding machines in the world make Hobie's biggest kayaks, the largest of which is the 18'6" Tandem Island kayak trimaran. It's a fantastic sailing kayak for a lot of reasons, but it's an expensive kayak at $5500.

But if you think of it as a sailboat that can easily do 10 knots, is exceptionally stable, and sails like a big-boat rather than like a dinghy, then what you'd consider to be the most expensive kayak in the world is also the world's least expensive sailboat.

The hull is extremely durable--I've run mine aground on shoal rocks with no damage at all. Yes, that's also because it's lightweight, but its mostly because linear crosslinked LDPE is extremely strong but flexible. And all it takes to make the hull many times stronger and twice as thick is to toss twice as much plastic pellet into the rotomolding machine before you turn it on. No extra labor, no extra machine time, and only $40 more in materials.

If somebody really wanted to start another sailing revolution, they'd build a Potter 18 sized sailboat that two people can camp in comfortably for a weekend out of LLDPE that weighs 1000 lbs. complete and ship it on trailer for $10,000.

Then you've got a boat that will get the younger generation into sailing, because right now the average age of sailors is increasing by 1 every year due to the lack of inexpensive ways to get into the hobby.
K9Kampers
Admiral
Posts: 2441
Joined: Thu Apr 13, 2006 7:32 am
Sailboat: MacGregor 26X
Location: NH, former 26X owner

Re: Sacrilege

Post by K9Kampers »

K9Kampers wrote:Nicely done CP! Now consider removing the single mast and placing parallel masts / sails at the original mast locations on each hull.
Chopper Pilot wrote:I can modify it any way you guys like as long as it fits the idea of a catamaran
Image
User avatar
Russ
Admiral
Posts: 7543
Joined: Thu Oct 11, 2007 12:01 pm
Sailboat: MacGregor 26M
Location: Bozeman, Montana "Luna Azul" 2008 M 70hp Suzi

Re: Sacrilege

Post by Russ »

mastreb wrote:The largest rotomolding machines in the world make Hobie's biggest kayaks, the largest of which is the 18'6" Tandem Island kayak trimaran. It's a fantastic sailing kayak for a lot of reasons, but it's an expensive kayak at $5500.

But if you think of it as a sailboat that can easily do 10 knots, is exceptionally stable, and sails like a big-boat rather than like a dinghy, then what you'd consider to be the most expensive kayak in the world is also the world's least expensive sailboat.
How do you like that Hobie Mirage? It sure looks like fun and an easy way to get on the water. My boat is 90 miles from here and it takes a lot of energy to drive all the way up there if I don't plan on making a full day or weekend out of it.

I could take that little Hobie on the little lake 5 minutes away and get some sailing out of my system.
User avatar
mastreb
Admiral
Posts: 3927
Joined: Wed Feb 09, 2011 9:00 am
Sailboat: MacGregor 26M
Location: Cardiff by the Sea, CA ETEC-60 "Luna Sea"
Contact:

Re: Sacrilege

Post by mastreb »

I love it. I use it for exactly that purpose: It's 45 minutes to and from the marina for the big boats, but I can go ten minutes away to a lagoon and launch the Hobie by hand. I can drive out, rig, launch, recover, de-rig, and tow home in a total of 30 minutes, so in two hours I can get 90 minutes of sailing done. It's faster than any large boat, and the roller furling main is a piece of cake to operate. Super simple to sail, and all the controls are run to both seats except for the roller furling. The way its rigged is very clever.

It'll do 6 knots easily and I've had it up to 9 knots by my GPS watch. It sails "butt wet" so I sail in boat shoes, swim trunks, and a T-shirt. There are scuppers in the seat but I've yet to have a completely dry sail and I wouldn't expect to be able to use it and stay dry. Sails and pedals in 2' of water and paddles in 6"--I think it would be a fantastic boat for the keys. I hear people have been able to capsize them but I'm not sure how. They're very stiff. I've taken it out into the Pacific from Oceanside a few times for a few miles but I've never been in anything beyond 2' swells which it handles easily.

The mirage pedal drive is a thing of wonder: You'll go faster than walking speed using just a walking pace. You can pedal this thing all day long at 3..4 knots. I'd love to be able to use the mirage drive with a tender, it would eliminate any need for a small outboard. The TI has two drives, so my wife and I just switch off one one or the other gets tired. I've yet to use the paddle for anything but reversing.

You will definitely want to get the trailer, as car-topping it would be difficult for anybody. It's heavy at 200 lbs. total weight and 100 lbs. for the main hull. It can be trailered by any vehicle.

If you get one, definitely get the trailer, get the heavy duty wheel set, and get the tramps. If you'll be parking it outside, get the cover. It's possible for two men to struggle it to the water but the plug-in wheels make it easy and they stow upside down on the stern. It's too heavy to cartop IMHO and saltwater is a good way to ruin a truck. trailering it is a piece of cake--it's much easier to launch and recover directly onto and off of the trailer than the MacGregor is.

The trailer can be moved by hand but it's heavy; I use a $40 cheap tow dolly from Harbor Freight to maneuver it into my backyard for storage.

When we go to catalina/channel islands next we will be using it as our tender as it comes to shore in a surf much more easily than the inflatable and is much simpler to move. With the kids (14, 12, 10) on the tramps we can take the entire family out on it though its a little over its 650 lb. rating that point.

It's a lot of fun. Bit expensive to justify as a tender though.
sirlandsalot
Engineer
Posts: 146
Joined: Sun Aug 11, 2013 3:50 pm
Sailboat: MacGregor 26M
Location: Kimberley, BC, Canada

Re: Sacrilege

Post by sirlandsalot »

I too sail a small cat for fun, 18 foot boston waler beach cat. A jib and main, full trapeze systems and I have had it around 25 mph on the gps......insane amount of fun for a 1982 machine. Cheap and a hull of a ride. I restored it to new shape a few years ago and I will never sell it.


Mastreb, your add I just saw on crack book, absolutely hilarious! Boom!
User avatar
mastreb
Admiral
Posts: 3927
Joined: Wed Feb 09, 2011 9:00 am
Sailboat: MacGregor 26M
Location: Cardiff by the Sea, CA ETEC-60 "Luna Sea"
Contact:

Re: Sacrilege

Post by mastreb »

The Hobie tri tops out around 10 knots. Faster would be pretty terrifying because you can't shift your weight to the outboard ama without some serious modifications. It's plenty fast enough anyway.

I'm going to figure out how to carry it aboard my new boat, which is long enough to easily accommodate it on deck, because it would be an excellent tender for two people having the mirage drives. I suppose it would be easiest to carry the main hull only. With the drop stern it would be a piece of cake to embark and debark from the boat. I suppose I could just tow it as well. Should create less drag than the inflatable.
Post Reply