Thread: Setsuna - A Goat Island Skiff build in Sydney, Australia

Sounds like you've got a handle on it then!

Since I grew up with water issues, I promised myself a thousand times that I would never, ever, EVER buy a house with a wet basement. But my wife and I fell in love with a house that was known to have "a little seepage, occasionally".

Right. Most of the house sits right on the granite bedrock, which slopes down to the north. Much of my basement floor is just the rock. Water cannot go under the foundation, so it piles up behind the uphill wall until it finds a way in. Then it flows to the sump and gets pumped out again. No way I'm drilling into granite to put in a French drain. So we redirect the flow as best we can.

This would be alright if the WHOLE foundation rested on the rock. But the south side is on clay. That side has shifted and sunk in the 70 years since the house was built. Not one doorway in my house is square. Some of the windows have never opened in the 12 years we've owned the place. And, yes, we've had those mind-twisting conversations about how to hang the pictures.

I'd sell up and move away tomorrow if we weren't 100m from the beach and boat ramp and if the view from my home office didn't look out over some of the most beautiful islands on the East Coast of the US. So it looks like I'm stuck with some water issues for the foreseeable future.

G'day Paulie,

When we bought the house it was - although we didn't know it at the time - right at the end of a prolonged drought, and the place was as dry as chips. The day that we moved in the drought ended, and we found out what we'd actually bought that very day. There was a Great Squawking and Clucking(TM), as you can imagine. That was a bit over 15 years ago and I'm still at it! Not just the squawking and clucking but the damp remediation. I started the 'Duck at the beginning of a wetter period, but it took a while for the rain to build up at that time.

While we don't live near the sea (I used to, and miss it a lot), where we are is very nice; and although we occasionally make plans to move, we find that its benefits outweigh the damp.

Granite would make the ironstone that I've been dealing with look like chalk!

Hopefully the rain will hold off for the next few days so that I can deal with the path at the top of the chute - putting in a little concrete wall to deflect some of the cascade.

Paulie .. i wish there was a facebook style "like" button I could click to say I like a post. Yours above has a wonderful poetic quality. Very nice writing.

MIK

On a Goat-related issue, I recently acquired a couple of 6-foot lengths of 3 " (75 mm) x 1 " (25 mm) cross-section oregon for the Goat. I had plans to slice each board into two x 12 mm slabs using a thin-kerf bandsaw and make the birdsmouth mast out of that, as I feel that the Goat deserves a round mast. The plan, however, stipulates 17 mm-thick staves, so that idea is out as I can only get four staves (34 mm wide at the foot) out of the lot at that thickness, even if I "dovetailed" the stave shapes on the blank to save space.

Is it feasible from the point of view of strength to alternate, e.g., hoop pine and oregon staves in a birdsmouth mast? It would look very speccy, but would the difference in strengths 'twixt the two timbers make a weaker mast than if either timber were used on its own? I've got more than enough hoop to be able to make up staves from that - or even enough for a whole birdsmouth mast in hoop ;).

One further thought, the mixed mast is a Very Silly Idea(TM), I suspect...

OK, well, after a rather surprising silence from everybody, I decided to not be my usual lazy self and fossicked through my Goat folder until I found an article, really a couple of extracts from Keith Boolte's "Wood in Australia: types, properties and uses", comparing - funnily enough - oregon and hoop pine.

Happily for me, I found that various densities ("basic", dry & green), dry and green states' moduli of elasticity and rupture, max. crushing strength, impact (Izod) and hardness (Janka), were all very similar for hoop pine and US coastal oregon, which is possibly the closest to what I have in hand. From this I decided that there won't actually be a problem with mixing the two timbers, especially as they will be alternated.

Mr Storer also replied to my direct email to him, with the same conclusion :).

I'll need to laminate the hoop staves together since the ones I have (for the square mast) are only 12 mm thick, and per above, the stipulated thickness for staves for the birdmouth mast is 17 mm. That's a bit easier than sourcing more oregon of a similar quality to what I acquired recently - the latter bordering on the impossible, I think. Or at least within reach of my pocket, which amounts to the same thing anyway ;).

Hi Alex .. I think I replied to this by email?

But I think alternating with such similar timbers as Oregon (Doug Fir) and Hoop pine would work fine.

Best wishes
Michael.

Originally Posted by AlexN

Mr Storer also replied to my direct email to him, with the same conclusion :).

Originally Posted by Boatmik

Hi Alex .. I think I replied to this by email?

But I think alternating with such similar timbers as Oregon (Doug Fir) and Hoop pine would work fine.

Yes, you did :).

Cheers and thanks once again,
Alex,

OK, I'm going to be offline for a day or so while I hose the hard disk - complete format and reinstall, and only a selected amount of stuff is going to be moved back onto the working hard disk. Something has carried over from the old computer and is making things very difficult with the new machine. The quickest was now is to do the above, I'm fed up with ineffective, interminable and unnecessary bug-testing and trouble-shooting loops. A final back-up needs to be made tomorrow morning to get the overnight emails, then I'm going to try out the boot-from-Lion-infested-USB-stick trick. I've also got some concreting to do. Fingers crossed...

Is the Mac ready for a sand and another coat of varnish yet?

Originally Posted by Boatmik

Is the Mac ready for a sand and another coat of varnish yet? :)

Nah, this is the axe/bandsaw/40-grit/hammer stage ;). I'm getting sick of waiting five minutes for a dialogue or folder window to open. Time to grap the nettle...

...and buy a PC ??... ;-)

I don't know if it works on Oz ticks but we spread powdered sulphur to encourage the ticks to go bother someone else. It is not nasty enough to kill anything but makes a statement of ownership over the territory.

Originally Posted by b.o.a.t.

...and buy a PC ??... ;-)

I do need a PC to run Linux for EMC2 (CNC software) but that can wait until such time as I've got the magic box o' tricks assembled and tested ;). I'm still battling with the taddie pond.

As you might guess I've done the hatchet job - or the first part at any rate. The really scary bits, in fact: nuking the HDD and checking the backups (eek!). The machine is now rebooting when I tell it to, not sitting starting at me with its tongue poking out, the hard disk is no longer rattling its heads off (I'd love an SSD (solid state drive) but the prices are still too steep, and the drive sizes "too small" at present), and folder windows are popping up nice and quick (they should do, the CPU is an Intel quad-core 2.93 GHz i7 with an almost silly amount of RAM). On the other hand, the file system isn't having to do much work as there is very little on the HDD at the moment: I'm currently restoring my music/video library from backup - the really important stuff ;) - and that will make a bit of a dent.

I am, however, going to be really selective about what I put back on from anywhere else, and will take my time over it. All my Flickr uploads are up-to-date so I won't worry about the image archives for a while. I should "back them up" back onto the new old disk, of course...

Cheers,
Alex.

Originally Posted by dkirtley

I don't know if it works on Oz ticks :) but we spread powdered sulphur to encourage the ticks to go bother someone else. It is not nasty enough to kill anything but makes a statement of ownership over the territory.

Cool! I'll try it out! interesting that they react to sulphur in that way - or is it their vectors, e.g., possums, bandicoots, etc., I wonder?