Classic Wooden Yachts
in UK

To the builders of classic wooden sailing yachts, the hulls are more than just a sleekly shaped vessel whose job it is to keep out the water.

Wooden yachts, and particularly wooden sailing yachts, have to withstand a range of loads and impacts, and builders and designers have developed some remarkably complex structures to handle those loads.

The hull and deck must be strong enough to withstand loads from tons of water, and to cope with point loads, such as those that occur when a yacht is propped up ashore, or hits an object as sea. Taken as a whole, the hull has to be stiff enough to resist bending forces when supported between two waves, when hard aground on a rocky ledge, and from the pull of shrouds and stays.

Finally, special reinforcing must be built in to cope with loads such as those from the mast, which does its best to punch a hole through the bottom, and the rudder, which seeks to tear a hole in stern.

The problem is complicated by the fact that we expect classic wooden sailing yachts to be capable of withstanding these loads for years. The marine environment is harsh, and accelerates corrosion and decay in most materials. Wooden yachts must be designed and built with an extra factor of strength in order to cope with the inevitable deterioration that takes place over time.

The Nature of Wood for Classic Wooden Yachts 

Yachts can be built out of almost anything, but not all building materials for yachts are equally suited to the task. It is no accident that, historically, most yachts have been built of wood, as it combines strength and resilience in a lightweight, easily worked form. In many respects wood is the ideal yacht building material, due to its exceptional stiffness.

The stiffness of a material is largely what determines how much it bends when under load. In general, if a material can resist bending or flexing, it will prove amply strong in other respects, such as resisting tensile loads. Wood combines stiffness with light weight in a way that makes it structurally more efficient, stiffer for its weight, than just about any other material, including high tech laminates.

All wooden yachts benefit from wood's remarkable structural properties, but traditionally constructed hulls can't take full advantage of the properties of wood due in part to the difficulty in effectively fastening all the various pieces together. They also absorb far more moisture than is ideal; many woods are two or even three times stronger when dry than they are when saturated with moisture.

These drawbacks don't make traditional construction a poor choice; they simply mean that such craft will be somewhat heavier than a laminated hull of the same strength.