M.B. Marsh Design offers a steadily growing range of plans for small watercraft. Our services include custom design, refit planning, condition surveys, failure analysis, systems integration and more.

Our designs hit what we think is an ideal balance between performance, capabilities, cost and ease of construction. Most of them are suitable for amateur or advanced amateur construction. These are boats that you can build in your garage, needing only patience, common tools, basic carpentry and fibreglass skills, and a willingness to learn. The resulting vessels are stylish, capable boats that will serve you well for many years.

From The Drawing Board

New designs from our drawing board, and assorted thoughts on boat design in general.

Late-night inspirations

Submitted by Matthew on

Sometimes it's fun to get a bit carried away with design work. Even if it does cut into sleep a bit.

Assessing crew risks on a powerboat

Submitted by Matthew on

Should you require all crew on your boat to wear lifejackets? If so, under what conditions? Should you restrict access to some parts of the vessel when underway? Should those rules change in different weather conditions, or with different kinds of boat traffic nearby?

I suspect that many skippers make these decisions based on gut feeling and on who they side with in bar or forum arguments. Frankly, I don't think that's the best way to make critical safety decisions.

Risk assessment is a very well-developed art. Not every decision calls for a formal risk assessment, but putting a bit of logical thought into your key safety policies is certainly a prudent idea. Today, I present an informal walk-through of this process for the Starwind 860 trimaran we're currently building.

Stretching out a powerboat

Submitted by Matthew on

Design ideas tend to build up around here faster than they can be written down. At the moment, there are seven boats on the board:

  • The Starwind 860 is under construction and her detail drawings are still being finished up.

  • The Bonaventure 570's construction drawings are in work.

  • An up-sized Almaguin (5.8 m) is awaiting final construction drawings.

  • The four Awenda planing-hull designs are on the back burner, waiting for a calm spell.

And after John Harries' post this morning on why long thin boats are cool, I couldn't resist pulling out the CAD models of the Bonaventure 1180 for a bit more detailing.

Steering and throttle cable routing

Submitted by Matthew on

Control cable routing is often a bit of an afterthought. In a small, simple boat, it's often OK for the designer to more or less ignore the engine controls, and trust that the builder will know how to install them. That approach doesn't work so well for a larger vessel, like the Starwind 860 trimaran, in which the exact routing of each control cable must be planned out to avoid conflicts.

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In The Shop

Dispatches from the shop: Progress reports on our boat building projects, plus some useful information for those of you who are building, restoring or repairing your own boats.

Mounting hardware on cored decks: Right and wrong ways

Submitted by Matthew on

Improperly mounted hardware is a constant source of frustration for boat owners. Sometimes it's water leaking in through a bolt hole, sometimes it's rust bleeding onto the deck, sometimes it's a cleat that tears off its mount under load.

Here's how to mount hardware on cored fibreglass decks correctly, so you won't have to deal with it again- and a few examples of why things go wrong otherwise.

Boat embryo at 60 hours

Submitted by Matthew on

It's about time for another update on the Starwind 860 power trimaran project.

Katy calls it a "boat embryo" now. Several key assemblies- the outrigger struts and the strut-to-crossbeam junction blocks- are complete. Almost all of the custom machining is done. There's a steering wheel (a proper ship's wheel, of course- could it possibly be otherwise?) and the helm shaft assembly is finished except for a bit of thread cutting.

Strut blocks for the Starwind 860

Submitted by Matthew on

Our current situation, with regards to the construction of the Starwind 860 power trimaran, requires that we stick to small bits: there simply isn't enough space at the moment to build the entire boat. In order to minimize the time for which we'll need a full size build shed, we're starting with the smaller and more fiddly pieces of the boat. These can fit in our current work space, and by having them pre-assembled, we'll save a lot of time during final assembly.

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