"Jacques Mertens" wrote in message ...
It's not natural selection against creativity but the opposite: I want that
creativity to be out there, free from regulations and count on natural
mechanisms to balance things.

Amateur boat builders should not be protected against their will, they
should be free to decide what level of safety they want. For example, all
our designs can be have the positive and upright bouyancy as specified in
the ABYC/USCG standards but the builder is free to decide if he wants it or
not.
I don't care about that in my boats, I prefer preventative safety.
It is true that such freedom goes with responsibility. The builder should be
responsible for understanding his choices and that may require some
education. Good amateur builders will learn enough about design and building
to make an educated choice. The others may choose to go with governement
standards but leave us the choice.
I lived through that in France 25 years ago: plans for amateurs had to be
homologated by a government agency. It delayed the publication of new plans
by almost one year and doubled or tripled the cost of developing a new
design. In one of our designs, we used polar coordinates instead of
cartesian. This is much more accurate for round bilge hulls and allowed the
builder to skip lofting. A little desktop dictator forced us to remove those
coordinates from the plans and revert to the old table of offsets. We lost
time and money, the builders lost the benefit of our mathematical lofting.
Check the price of boat plans for amateurs in France: 4 or 5 times higher.

That is exactly what I am afraid of, that kind of regulation and for
the same reasons as you. For now we will keep "inventing" and
tinkering. There is a lot of new material and technique out there to
still be developed and like you say, a lot of it will come from those
who are new as they have not yet been stuck into a certain mold. I
guess what got me going is a recent article in a very popular boating
mag that put me in a list with Mickelak (sp?), Payson, Jaques' Glen-L
and a few others. I was of course pretty excited, but at the same time
I don't know that I belonged in that category. Thanks to all that have
answered here, and sorry about going off on Per.

Scotty, just happy to be building boats...

Herreshoff and Atkins designed great boats without the ABYC standards,
without STYX stability calculations, without a PE license.

Designers and amateur builders are in the same boat :-)
Excessive regulations can destroy our freedom to build our own boats. We'll
be all stuck with cookie cutter plastic buckets . . . and their high cost.

--
Jacques
http://www.bateau.com


"Backyard Renegade" wrote in message
om...
Yes, that is what I was getting to. Natural selection, versus
creativity. Hopefully this will pan out so we don't end up like
builders in the UK where an operation like mine is almost impossible.