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Comparable used F9s currently sell in the range of $70-$90k. Comparable Corsair trimarans sell for a wider range, maybe $75k for a 10-year-old C/F31 up to $150k for a new C31-1D or "ultimate cruiser." So you're not going to save over buying a decent used boat. For the money, I had a lot of fun, a little bit of frustration, and ended up with a state-of-the-art trimaran that took me to the Bahamas. A good deal in my opinion. My boat is basic, basic basic! When launched I didn't even have nets installed or a sail cover. Now I have used trampolines that I patched up myself and a very nice Lazy Cradle. Still no roller furler for the jib and only one self-tailing winch. Parts of the interior have nothing more than primer and are only partly faired, and the icebox is an Igloo. The only complex interior system is the Lavac head/holding tank/pumpout. It won't cost much to complete the interior since I have all the materials but my priority was getting the boat on the water and the primitive accomodations didn't matter much when cruising. The big material costs are epoxy, fiberglass, and core, hardware, rigging, and sails. Buying a few giant drums of epoxy instead of 1-gallon and 5-gallon pails would have saved me a few hundred dollars and not been worth the hassle of moving it from shop to shop. I spent about $4000 on epoxy and vinylester. It made sense to buy most of the fiberglass and carbon fiber by the roll since it's much easier to transport. After the first roll is finished you can estimate how much more you'll need and whether you should buy another roll or switch to cut lengths. It's easier than estimating epoxy. Fortunately I bought all the carbon I needed before our genocidal president started his wars and caused as a trivial consequence the runup in carbon fiber prices. Ian Farrier isn't going to get rich selling boat plans. Even counting extras like the F-32 upgrade trade-in, he made less money from my boat than Randy Repass. I used the latest high-tech lines: Dyneema, Amsteel, etc., and still spent less on all my running rigging than I spent on my outboard motor. APS supplied most of my lines and did most of the splicing for reasonable prices. Sails are expensive. My only new sail is the mainsail (Roger Hall), but the jib (Calvert), screacher+furler (Elliott-Patterson), and spinnaker (+sock) were all purchased used but in good shape from other Farrier sailors. Sails were the biggest line item in the budget. Had I bought all new sails, or expensive carbon sails, I could easily have spent twice as much. If you're building one of these boats, start looking for used sails early in the process. They are good training wheels. I installed the absolute minimum electronics. At launch I had only a handheld VHF, but I've since added a fixed-mount DSC VHF. I have a compass and one instrument: a Horizon 100 Speed/Depth that cost less on clearance than the two transducers it's attached to. In retrospect I could have just bought the depth since the speed is less accurate than GPS and therefore useless. I have heard that there are some new transducers available that count bubbles skimming by so there's no paddlewheel to get gummed up, but I haven't tried one yet. The other downside to the multiple-readout display is that I frequently have the disconcerting experience of misreading depth for speed and vice versa, since you're as likely to be doing 10 knots in 6 feet of water in this boat as you are to be doing 6 knots in 10 feet. Here we're doing 6 knots with reefed main and no jib in 8 feet of water; fortunately it got deeper soon after and we went back to full sail and double digit speeds.  The GPS in that picture was 10 years old but I splurged recently and bought a slightly newer model (GPSmap 76) with a bigger display and chart capability. I don't really use the charts but it's nice not to have to peer at a 1/4" tall heading from across the cockpit. The only instrument that I would really like to add is a wind indicator but it's at least $1000 and you need a place to mount it. If you put it on the mast you're talking several thousand for a high-end system that compensates for mast rotation. I also didn't install a tiller pilot until after I steered by hand from Miami to George Town, Bahamas and that was a mistake. The $300 or so is money well spent. My electrical system is also very simple. Three cabin lights (some with LED bulbs), two group 27 batteries, instrument wiring and a couple of cigarette lighter outlets. The big splurge was for a Xantrex battery monitor to determine how well the engine and solar panels (Harbor Freight special) charge the batteries. The other splurge was for an OGM LED masthead tricolor that switches to an all-around white anchor light. Both were money well spent. Shipping and tax add up to a significant chunk. I paid almost $1900 in shipping charges and $610 in tax. Almost all of the tax was for purchases at my local West Marine and at McMaster-Carr, where I purchased all of my stainless hardware. The killer with McMaster is that because they ship from Ohio, you pay both shipping charges and sales tax, and shipping charges can be expensive for 5-foot fiberglass tubes and heavy stainless hardware. I spent almost as much on bolts and nuts as I did on the expensive sailboat parts that those bolts and nuts are holding. I bought most of my supplies online and most of the time the sales tax savings outweighs the shipping charge. Plus it's nearly impossible to buy specialized boatbuilding supplies in Ohio unless you want to pay the West Marine premium. I love West Marine, but I shop there for the outstanding warranty service, not for the prices. And my local store caters mainly to powerboaters so they have a limited selection of sailboat hardware and an even more limited selection of nuts and bolts. The only material I ever found locally was nylon bunting from the fabric shop, used as peel ply. The supply of stainless hardware at your local home improvement warehouse is about 1% of the inventory of McMaster. Standing rigging is cheap. I bought bare extrusions for my mast and boom from Mike Leneman and Precourt synthetic standing rigging, and added all the hardware myself. Building the mast and boom was fun and one of the easiest projects on the boat, and the only one that didn't require any sanding. Buy as many pre-made metal parts as you can. When I examined the cost of shipping long pieces of aluminum (unfortunately there was no local supplier) and having them welded locally, it would have made much more sense to buy them pre-made. Fortunately I bought lots of stuff from Corsair (the entire gooseneck assembly, spreaders, mast yoke, etc.) and Precourt supplied my beam folding system, deadeyes, mast base, chainplate thimbles, etc. Both Corsair and Precourt parts are a real bargain unless you are an experienced metalworker with easy access to a milling machine, plus 316 stainless and 6061-T6 aluminum supplies. Phil Brander's services for milling foils are another great bargain, compared to the endless tedium of doing it yourself (especially when combined with the knowledge that you're never going to get it as perfect as the computer on his CNC milling machine). One of my guiding principles was to keep it simple and only change stuff after I had sailed the boat a while and decided something needed to be more complex. So my boat started with only 3 winches (2 of which are hand-me-downs from a previous boat), 6 blocks, 4 clutches, and 3 cam cleats for running rigging. Sometimes I took this principle too far: the initial roller reefing arrangement might have actually worked if I had installed a running topping lift instead of a fixed one, and 28 knots steady in the Tongue of the Ocean was the wrong place to discover this fact. By far the biggest running rigging expense was the 8-foot traveler track and Harken Big Boat car. Adding a screacher required adding a bow pole with whisker stays and a bobstay, blocks, furler, furling line cleat, bobstay line cleat, halyard, clutch, sheets, sheet cleats, etc. Launch without a screacher and you save about $3000. Same for the spinnaker. Were I to do it again I would probably pick one or the other until I started racing, and I would probably pick the screacher, since it works in a greater range. Buy hardware in the middle of winter when everybody is clearing out inventory. I bought the traveler car in January of the year that the "captive bearing" car came out. The new car costs about $200 more, and the sole advantage is that you can remove it without worrying about losing all the ball bearings. How often do you remove your traveler car, anyway? I probably would have had the beams built professionally if either Ian Farrier or Erik Precourt could have fit it into their production schedule on time. As it is, Ian is just now ramping up production of the new beams and Erik has just launched an F-39, so both are very busy. In the end it only took me 6 weeks or so to build them. It helped that they were the last major fiberglass/carbon parts I built and that I did them all at once instead of one at a time, and I ended up saving about $14000 since I already had the materials. After building the beams, I had about 28" left on my 100-yard roll of carbon unidirectional. I recently calculated how much I spent in the year after I launched the boat and was surprised to find that it was over $12,000. There were a few big ticket items related to the Bahamas trip: new Nissan 9.8 outboard, professional bottom paint job, new dinghy from West Marine, Lazy Cradle from UK sails, and some Fedex Air charges for replacement parts. Before you launch the boat you can shop around and wait for the best deal. After you launch, you just want to get something that works, particulary if you're in the middle of a cruise. |