In a message dated 8/4/03 12:03:20 AM, trawler-world-list-request@lists.samurai.com Julian writes: << I agree. I'm often amazed how poor the general ergonomics of many helms tend to be. This seems to be a whole area of boat design where many builders and designers just refuse to attempt to innovate, or even do things that just seem to be basic common sense. It seems to me that the whole area of helm design could benefit from a lot more fresh thinking, especially for single handers. >> This is all the more surprising since the fundamentals of good ergonomic panel design and instrument design have been known for at least half a century. Numerous Mil Specs delineate the layout and design of instruments in vehicles ranging from trucks, through aircraft, to nuclear submarines. Boat manufacturers who supply to the military must conform to these specs so ignorance is no excuse. But the civilian market marches to a different drummer. Years ago I visited a colleague who was in charge of automobile instrument panel design at General Motors. He showed me an advance version of the upcoming instrument design for one of the GM cars. It was particularly bad, strip speedometers, cramped guages, hard to read numbers, and glittering chrome. On a previous job my friend had quite successfully supervised the cockpit design of USAF fighters and had, in fact written one of the Mil Specs I mentioned earlier. When I asked him why this panel was so bad when surely he knew better, he replied "If we do it right this year, what are we going to do for next year?" Larry Z P.S. If any boat builder is reading this, I would be happy to send the titles of a 5 foot shelf of books, covering equipment design, layout and maintenance. It wouldn't hurt.

Larry wrote: This is all the more surprising since the fundamentals of good ergonomic panel design and instrument design have been known for at least half a century. Numerous Mil Specs delineate the layout and design of instruments in vehicles ranging from trucks, through aircraft, to nuclear submarines. Boat manufacturers who supply to the military must conform to these specs so ignorance is no excuse. Earl Fleck : - Building Mi Sueno, 44-foot Neville Motor Yacht wrote: I would find it useful to have an idea of the principles of instrument panel layout as I build my motor yacht. REPLY Unfortunately this still does not specify which instrument is located where. They do recommend which sort of data is more relevant than other but don't expect to find instructions saying the chart plotter goes to the right of the radar and the temp gage goes below the pressure gage sort of thing. cheers Arild --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.423 / Virus Database: 238 - Release Date: 11/25/2002