For the casual observer,not a lot of attention is paid to the side door that we have worked so hard to incorporate into the Sabre 40. Some readers may not have even noticed the door in the renderings but it is a really big deal for the people who are serious about this design. If you know our powerboats from the 90's you will know that we never truly conquered the "seal around the side door" issue. Sliding doors are simply hard to build and hard to make air tight. So when we set about designing the 40, the side door presented a challenge for the Design Team. Call it Yankee Ingenuity or just plain smart but the final design is brilliant (in our humble opinion)
Let's start at the beginning, Designs have to have a certain beam to length ratio to perform in the desired envelope. Here's where the decisions begin. How wide do the side decks need to be? For Sabre they have to be safe and secure. No white plastic boat mini decks for us. I hope you can see where I am headed. Now, after deducting the side deck dimension from the beam we have the width of the salon remaining. The balance is key. Back to the side door.
The best way to make the side door work (and have it be air tight) is to have it hinge aft and lay against the side of the house. But if the side deck is narrower than a reasonable door is wide, clever design has to overcome. You'll see on these images that our side door has the bottom foot or so cut back so that when the door swings it passes inside the lower guard rail.Good ergonomics tell us that our feet don't care if something is narrow but our hips and shoulders need to feel like they can fit easily through an opening. So the wedge shape at the bottom is our way of giving you a great side door and keeping both side deck width and salon width where they should be.
Ta Da !