The New F-22 Sport Tri
A Low Cost Trailerable Trimaran

Construction

Buying a finished boat is the quickest way to get on the water, but it will still be some time before 'sailaway' F-22™s are available to buy. Kit hulls will be available sooner, but in the meantime the only solution is to build your own hulls, and assemble with the ready-made beams and folding system.

The fastest way to build is with vertical stripped foam, as used by all other Farrier designs. All interior parts and bulkheads can be pre-cut panels. This is where such panels work well.

Method and Materials: Vertical foam stripping as used for all other modern Farrier designs is the recommended choice, though cedar stripping will still be an option for those who prefer wood, or cannot obtain foam. Cedar wood strips are very durable, but the build will take much longer and the finished boat will be significantly heavier.

While hulls can be self built, the beams, hull mounts for the beams, and the folding system will only be available ready made from Farrier Marine to speed up the building process, and to maintain the quality of these important components. Such things as daggerboards, daggerboard case, rudders etc. will also be available individually ready made, as required, to help speed up the building process.

Building Time: The actual building time is hard to estimate until the first boats are built, but the target time to assemble from kit hulls is around 4 to 6 months part time, and 10 to 12 months if building your own hulls. Thus the kit F-22™ will be a good winter project for a builder with moderate skills. Quick and easy building are the main objectives of the F-22™, so it will be a little more basic and simple in many areas, with fewer curved surfaces and rounded corners. One such example is float decks, which are flat, this eliminates the need to form recesses for float hatches, makes the beam/float join very simple, while joining the flangeless floats is far easier, the deck now being a simple 'drop on' flat panel. Float deck edges also have only a small radius, to avoid having to heat bend foam around the large radius corners as on larger designs, eliminating another time consuming step.

But perhaps most importantly, the need for accurately aligned bulkheads for the folding system has been eliminated by the new third generation folding system. Thus it is now feasible to have the basic hulls built anywhere, and without any special alignment requirements, the ready made mounts for the beams and folding system just being slotted in, and only needing to be centered, leveled, and spaced apart the correct distance before taping in place.

There have also been numerous structural improvements, making the boat simpler, plus both stiffer and lighter. One example is the cockpit floor panel, which now extends right through the boat to the bow forming the cabin settees and bow bunk. This makes a very stiff and strong box-like backbone structure, saving both weight, and time.

Start :: the interior :: the folding system :: building :: performance :: the plans

Ian Farrier
Farrier Marine, Inc.
January 2008