| Details | | Publication Date: | 1994-10-01 |
| Size | | Height: | 9.3 in | | Width: | 7.5 in | | Thickness: | 0.5 in | | Weight: | 10.4 oz |
Publisher's Note
Since the late 1950s, when the first "plastic" sailboat shocked the New York Boat Show, fiberglass boatbuilding has gone through classic growing pains. Longtime yacht broker and marine surveyor Henry Mustin has seen it all: the slow acceptance of those early, heavy boats; the market boom of the lighter boats of the 1970s; the "boat pox" scare of the 1980s; and the continued lack of industry standards that makes buying and owning a fiberglass boat an adventure. In Surveying Fiberglass Sailboats Mustin explains what to watch for in a used sailboat from each era, and how to ferret out the hidden defects in any boat. He shows how to estimate the cost of repairs and the value of a boat. And he addresses the question: When is a fiberglass boat too used up to save?
Mustin's part-by-part look at hull, deck, rig, and machinery is both a minicourse for transforming used-boat shopping from a game of craps to a science, and the first step in a holistic boat maintenance program. His discussion of the significance of cracks found in aging hulls and decks is the most thorough in print. He is not shy in assessing the lack of regulation of professional surveyors, nor does he shrink from pointing a finger at shoddy building practices.
Having a used boat surveyed is a critical prelude to buying it. Yet a professional survey is expensive--several hundred dollars. Surveying Fiberglass Sailboats will enable you to conduct your own surveys while narrowing the field, then monitor a professional surveyor's performance when selecting your target boat.
Surveying Fiberglass Sailboats will help you screen out the bad from the good when buying a new or used boat; educate you in the craft of surveying, enabling you to hire a good surveyor and get better value for the fee; enable you to inspect your own boat, identify incipient problems, and design a maintenance program; prepare you for the practicality and cost of repairs and improvements and their probable effect on a boat's market value; identify common flaws in the way boats were or are being built so that you can be on guard against these problems in new or old boats; and answer the question, When is a boat too far gone to resuscitate?
Industry Reviews
``. . .one book we'd recommend to anyone looking at used boats (or new, for that matter). . .[Mustin's] book shows you what and where to look for signs of trouble.''
``Books about marine surveying are often overly technical and pedantic. Not so [this book]. . .It's a concisely written primer. . .Mustin is adept at distilling often highly involved subjects, so you should be able to learn the fundamentals of evaluating a vessel's major structures, systems and equipment.''
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