Amateur Boat Building in Brazil

We are the Brazilian pioneers in boat design for amateur construction. Back in the late seventies we designed the MC23, a sailboat specified to be built with marine plywood sheathed with fibreglass.

Our first clients were two young engineers who constructed the boat in a very short time, and as soon as the work was concluded, they started to use her intensively, sailing to different places on the Brazilian coast.

Encouraged with this good result, we decided to build ourselves a second unit of this design, just to check the degree of difficulty involved in the construction. Caso Sério (serious case in Portuguese) became a reference among local sailors as a seaworthy and fast low budget home built sailboat. Presently, after twenty-six years of intensive usage, this boat still remains in very good condition

These boats exerted a strong impact in the sailing community, who discovered in these two examples an alternative for obtaining the boat of their dreams in an affordable way, and from then on a great number of yachts of this class were built in different countries.

Multichine 23 MK1 - Caso Sério

The success of our first trial was an incentive to produce other designs for amateur construction. Since then we have already designed more than fifty stock plans intended for the amateur boat builder, some of them with more than one hundred boats constructed, presently having more than two thousand home made boats built from our plans.

During this time it seems that this segment of yacht design found no other supporters in our country, and at the moment we are alone as designers for amateurs. However this doesn't mean that we have no competition.

Local builders search carefully the international market for the best designs to suit their requirements. When they choose one of our stock plans, the fact that we are Brazilians has little or no influence in their choice. This attitude is very healthy. Knowing that we have to conquer the preference of our clients makes us produce appealing designs, and in attaining this requirement, it helps us to open the doors for the overseas market.

With this challenge in mind we are constantly up-grading our design techniques, being permanently involved in research in order to improve our building methods. Presently we are introducing the Samoa 28, our first design for strip plank sandwich construction. This method is very easy to build, requiring less time than the more conventional strip-plank over frames construction method. The quick acceptance for this new building method made us consider producing other designs for this boat building process.

Samoa 28 - specified for strip plank sandwich

To know more about our stock plans for amateur construction visit our site: www.yachtdesign.com.br
Roberto Barros
Rio de Janeiro, January 2006
Photos