Of the home built boat designs on the net, I only know of 2 designs which issue hull numbers to builders when their boats are built and publish them openly on the net: Mouseboats and PDRacers.
It seems like the rest of the designs record the number of plans sold, not actual hulls built.
In our hobby of building boats, many people will buy plans that they never intend to build (I am very guilty of this), so their total number of built hulls is hard to determine.
This is a graph showing the total number of hulls built per date, so you can see the growth rate.
Before typing in this data, I tried to predict in my head what it would look like, and I envisioned a more lumpy growth pattern with a ski jump at the end.
Now that the data is charted, it resembles more of a straight line growth pattern.
Gavin's Mouseboats have a few big jumps in them, I think they are from school shop classes that built several boats at the same time.
One obvious flaw with the data is that I suspect that numerous mouseboats have been built and never registered to get a hull number because they don't race each other, and it doesn't seem to be part of the glamor of that boat design.
I personally know of 5 mouseboats (they were 8' long plank rats) that were built in a couple of days for a weekend family camping trip.
I tried to get him to register, but he wasn't interested.
With a PDRacer, the hull numbers are proudly displayed with large lettering on their sides, making the effort of registering a hull more important to the builder.
This chart shows the number of hulls built per month, and I think it answers a nagging question I have wondered about for a long time -- Is there a boat building "season" of the year?
From looking at the data, I think the answer is YES, and it is in the July - September area.
Both the Mouseboats and PDRacers are very quick to build hulls, so the date they were completed and registered is most probably close to the date they were started, or atleast the majority of effort put into building the boat.
If you know of any other boat designs with similar construction data available, please let me know about it so I can add the data to the spreadsheet and update these graphs.
