This probably deserves its own thread, but Jeremy you are in CA, let me know how well it goes trying to get good help paying them 10 an hr.

Anybody willing to work for $10 an hr is not likely going to have the work ethic or the skill to produce anything near the complexity and tollerences of an A cat. Then figure at 10 an hr wage the builder has to cover insurances, taxes, bennefits and other over head items like OSHA, DEP, etc.

You should also figure in the cost of a garage or rental shed. I built composites in my garage when I was single. The smell and dust will be more than enough to piss of any wife/girl friend I know of. Put in some cost for tooling, especialy dust collection, or plan on extra time working around the mess and itch.

Then you have tooling and development. This is particularly pertinent given the discussion on the A class curved boards. Molds are expensive to build. There is a lot of R&D involved in developing a competitve boat, all of which needs to recovered buy any builder by the boats they sell. If you are lucky enough to borrow the molds, or use a developed technique for part of it (LR2 plans, or Blade plans FE) you are lucky but somebody spent money to develop it anyway. The actual cost to produce a set of curved board will likely be only slightly more than a set of straight ones. Someone will have to cover the cost of 2 sets of more expensive molds (4 molds if using a curved trunk too) There is either significan additional install labor or fixturing to ensure adsolute alignment as this will be adbolutely critical to thier operation. AND there will be a not insignificant amount of development to be done to apply these to any hull shape, as it is quite a bit more involved than a little fiberglass work.

Building your own boat is a very cool endeavor. If you have the resources to latch on to good priced components and tap others experience, it is quite possible to build a very good boat. I have never know anyone to save any money doing it though, it was stricktly for the love of the project.