A particular interest of mine is the care and maintenance of metal sailboats (see my other blog). Many, many of the things have been designed by the author of this bluntly titled work, Bruce Roberts (the Goodson came later). Mr. Roberts' designs are famous and/or notorious, because he's one of the best marketers of selling them to the general public in the last 30 years. Seriously, if it's homebuilt, looks wonky and sails like a bag of rocks, it's likely to be a Roberts design. No slag to the esteemable Mr. Roberts, merely that the "outsourced" nature of his career means a lot of guys who can't fold napkins are cutting and tack-welding steel using his plans.
My own steel pilothouse cutter, which admittedly looks like a Land Rover on a chine hull, albeit a very cleanly executed one, has been queried as being a Roberts design more than once. It is not. It looks more like a Ted Brewer or a Dutch design, actually, and it sails quite well for its hull form and displacement.
Stating that a lot of Roberts boats are crap is not to blame the man, but the method: Roberts' designs are conservative to start with, and by conservative I mean "potentially slow" and "easily made too heavy". This is because a lot of fellows in the past few decades have welded together from his plans pretty amateurish efforts. I estimate that one out of eight completed Roberts designs I've seen (and far from all are completed in the usual sense, as many weekend shipwrights give up at the bare hull stage) are done in the way Roberts intended. Still, as they say, the problem with democracy is that everyone gets a vote, and undoubtedly, Bruce Roberts' life work has brought boating, and even occasionally a decent boat, to the masses of folk who otherwise would never have attempted to construct their own yacht..
That's why when I was reading "Metal Boats", a 1998 cover-all-bases primer (pun intended) on all things floaty and metallic, I thought, perhaps uncharitably, that this book should have been handed out free with the lofting plans of Roberts' most popular designs, fewer of which would be rusting away, never to be completed, in the lonelier ends of the world's boatyards.
Using his own designs and finished examples as the basis for his commentary, Roberts shows in this book a deep understanding of the topic the sharing of which would be valuable to either the aspiring builder in steel, aluminum or something more exotic, or, like myself, the owner of something already decently built who wishes to keep it that way. Along with fairly methodical breakdowns of the construction process (and how to avoid the pitfalls of the first-time boat builder in metal), useful chapters on corrosion avoidance, electrical systems and tankage outline considerations peculiar to the metal sail or power boat. Oh, yes, Roberts does big metal power boats as well, and he very much hopes you will, too.
Profusely illustrated, if indifferently edited as perhaps is to be expected of a book with a limited potential audience, Metal Boats is a rare find along the lines of Nigel Warren's Metal Corrosion in Boats, which I'll review in the future. Like the boat repair compendiums of Nigel Calder (why are so many boat fixers called Nigel?), it belongs on any sailor's shelf, if what she sails goes "ping" and not "thud".
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