Rummel wrote:I put a tape on her and she is 17 feet. I am certainly no expert on the subject but it looks very similar to the other ds1's I have seen pictures of.
The seller had her listed on craigslist as a 1970 daysailer so I am
mostly operating on that information.
Ah, looked bigger in the pictures and the wooden seats give a different aspect the to the interior, making it look bigger and wider...
Now for the famous 1970 date:
I have formed a hypothesis that the state registration scheme must have started around that time and that any older DS boats are more likely than not entered with a default date, which would have then corresponded to the earliest date the registration scheme existed. This, not accidentally, coincides with the occasion of the introduction of the modern HIN. (Or perhaps the move to a computerized system, if they had manual registers before).
Older boats would not have an HIN, which has a standardized way to encode the year of manufacture and stricter rules about the number of places that ID number had to be present on the boat. Older boats just had a brass or aluminum plaque that (not infrequently) was lost (or removed).
If my hypothesis is right, then, any boat for which the paperwork says 1970 or 1971 could be anything from 1959 to that date (after that, the HIN would encode the year).
Anyway, check out the threads on "DS1 design changes", and the "Unofficial official...list".
