Case study
She came with her plans. She did not come with her history.
Llanreath spent fifteen years alongside before we bought her. The drawings and the manuals were aboard. What was missing was everything that had been done to her since — and on a boat under restoration, that absence costs money on every single job.
The starting point
Fifteen years is long enough for everything to be forgotten
A boat that has been laid up that long has no living memory attached to her. The people who worked on her have moved on. The invoices went with a previous owner. Whatever was replaced, and whatever was left, is now a question rather than a fact.
The plans and manuals tell you what she was built as. They do not tell you what she is now. Every job on a restoration therefore begins with the same overhead: working out what is actually there before you can decide what to do about it.
Two jobs
What it costs when nobody wrote it down
Neither of these is a dramatic failure. Both are ordinary restoration work, and both were made slower and more expensive by exactly one thing: the information was gone.
01 · Engine room floor plates
One screw left, and no record of what it was
The screws holding down the engine room floor plates were gone. All but one. That one screw was the only remaining evidence of what the other fixings had ever been.
So the work was not fitting screws. It was identifying a thread, a head, a length and a material from a single sample, then finding a supplier who had them. Cheap in parts. Expensive in hours — and every one of those hours was spent recovering information, not improving the boat.
What is different now
The specification sits in YachtPrep against the engine room floor, where it belongs. Type, dimensions, material, quantity, and where they came from.
The next time one is dropped in the bilge, the job is a few clicks and an order — not an afternoon of measuring and guessing. The work of finding out was done once, and it stays done.
System management · document management
02 · The main engine
It ran. That was all anyone could tell us.
The engine started and ran, and no one could say what had been done to it or when. There was no service history at all — so nothing could be ruled out, and everything had to be opened up and judged on what was found.
The seals and rings on number six were replaced. The oil cooler anode was replaced, which meant removing the cooler, taking it to the workshop, replacing, painting and pressure testing it before it went back aboard. Necessary work — but work that was chosen blind, because there was no record to consult.
What is different now
Her history begins again from here. Every one of those jobs is recorded against the engine with a date, what was done, and what was fitted — so the next decision is made against evidence rather than against a hunch.
We will never recover the first fifty years. We will never lose the next ones. And when she is eventually sold, the buyer will not be standing where we stood, guessing.
Maintenance history · checklists
What it is worth
The work of finding out is done once, or done every time
Restoring a boat is two projects at the same time: rebuilding her, and rebuilding what is known about her. The first is obvious and gets budgeted for. The second happens whether you plan it or not, in hours spent working out what was already there.
Written down, that effort becomes an asset. Left in a notebook or a head, it has to be spent again — by you next season, by whoever works on her after you, or by the person who buys her.
Llanreath’s record is open
Every system, component and specification aboard her is in YachtPrep and free to look at. It is the same product you would use on your own boat, with a real boat in it.