Thread: Wanted

Warning! Medical authorities warn that boat building can be harmful to your mental health.





HJ0 I'm low on bait, where are you myrnaboys.

Originally Posted by HJ0

Warning! Medical authorities warn that boat building can be harmful to your mental health.

Tis a well known affliction and a terrible one at that... there is no known cure and no known treatment that will ease the afflicteds situation... one if afflicted has no choice they cannot help themselves nor can anyone help them... they just are...

HJ0 I'm low on bait, where are you myrnaboys.

Bait is always available!!!

Originally Posted by Wild Dingo

Tis a well known affliction and a terrible one at that... there is no known cure and no known treatment that will ease the afflicteds situation

Rubbish, unlimited money will ease the situation nicely. Money buys workshop, tools, materials and the time to play as you wish. Mind, it doesn't 'cure' the condition, just makes it more bearable which, after all, is the only sensible approach.

Richard
poverty? I aspire to having that much money

Forget boat-building Dingo, you should be in comedy script-writing! I'd stay home and watch Oprah if the episodes were so funny.

I will add my "hussah!" to your comments though about Oz boat designs...for me, the interest is in the building - the journey, not the destination, as it were - and even now building model boats, once they're built I don't spend much time looking at them, and some get sold or given away.

Same thing with the real one - I want the experience in building it, then once it's done I don't even know how often I'll use it, but if it's seaworthy, attractive and summer I'm sure it will get plenty of use. Would certainly accompany me on holidays. Mind oyu, if I get the time, space and money to build or restore a large boat, I'd happily circumnavigate the country!

BUT, although I like some US and UK designs - from WB mag, Glen-L, and many other sources which seem prolific "over there" I'd rather support a local and have something distinctly Australia. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be that many designs out here that are unique - not like some that scream "I'm a yank boat". Couta's, luggers and the like aside.

So in the end I will either compromise and go with a Duck Flat or other source of plans, or if money allows, get an overseas design and get a local designer to do an Aussie interpretation. At present i'm in the "plans search" stage and compiling a shortlist, then I'll see if any are Aussie ones and if not see what I can do about it.

If anyone wants to put together a book of Australian designers and plans - maybe the relevant shops can get together - I'd support it, both through buying it and I'd even be happy to help put it together. There you go Mik, an offer of free help if it comes to light!

Good luck in your search Dingo and I look forward to seeing what you find out there to restore...I'll start from scratch and we can compare notes - race oyu to the launching slip!

Regards,
Darren

Watch this forum Darren - an exciting new fusion of David Payne and Mik Storer will be announced as soon as I get Mik's permission to start spreading the good news

Richard

Richard,

My breath is bated and the anticipation is tingling. I look forward to the design - 2 great designers and I have a couple of their vessels on my list. Maybe this will be the one I was waiting for!

Regards,
Darren

Oh 5hit my heads still on:eek:after making that mental health comment lol


HJ0 Whats a little insanity btw friends, long as they laugh at the joke lol

Originally Posted by Wild Dingo

But Doc Mik why should one HAVE to be either?... Why cant one be both?... I mean I spend as much time sailing and mucking about in canoes and dinghys as I can and love it... but I also spend a fair bit of time mucking about building bits and bobs for various boats... so why cant one be both? it is possible no?

That's why I am a boating psychologist Dingo.

I only gave you two options so now you know exactly where you are in relationship to the two of them!!! Because you couldn't make my statement fit your sense.

A cunning plan (that doesn't involve rats)

That's what I want people to consider - and to keep in mind as they make their boatbuilding decisions.

Builder or user?

MIK (laughing up his sleeve)

Dingo,

I am being even more serious now. You have probably thought of it yourself but ...

I was looking at the restoration of "Vanity"
http://users.bigpond.net.au/Vanity/Vanity.htm
What a classy classic - even with that doghouse.

And was struck by the first paragraph. Have you contacted the Australian Register of Ships and seen if they know of anything that is going begging?

The Register generally mentions the last known location and condition of boats. And the workers there probably have a soft spot for the same stuff you do so might tend to remember it.

There is a link to Mori Flapan's website on the Vanity page.

So maybe there are a few classics out there sitting overlooked somewhere.

Maybe the people involved in the restoration of Vanity (or the other boats in the other links at the bottom of the Vanity page.

It might be possible to get somewhere with some leads from the Register, or rather, the staff that maintain it

Best Regards
MIK

aahh see now theres the preduckument!! cant make up me flamin mind!! sigh... neba ming eh!

Now as to Aussie designs and designers... mmmm Im in a bit of a quandry here... see there was a boat book bought out by the woodenboat mob over east and I was lucky enough to know a bloke in Georgia who liked me enough to send me a copy! and its got a few in there but the trouble I found with it was that it gave no blasted addresses for the lines they showed!! which not only made me :mad: but also rather cause although there are some beautiful and I do mean stunningly beautiful American designs out there I really HONESTLY am hanging out for an Aussie version and this blasted book showed at least 2 that took my fancy but do you think I can find a ruddy address to send away to get them? NOT A RUDDY CHANCE!!!

Another prob I sorta have is the cost of plans in Aus... see now dont go all loopy on me here but I can get the plans for a 40ft schooner (some 60 sheets!!!) from the son of a designer in the US who is also a NA in his own right for less than I can get a design here! that phisses me off!! I mean in a way were contributing to our own demise here by simply out pricing the cost of ruddy plans so would be Ausssie boat builders source their plans ex US or UK... funny aint it?

But our biggest problem is sourcing plans... seeing a range of design choices and making a selection and then purchasing them from the source... almost impossible

Okay... heres a thing... I want ahem I would like thats bedda... I would like to find the source of an Australian designed schooner say 28ft or even 40ft... now tell me where Id find one! See now I can right now point myself to a designer in Maine that has one of each available now the smaller 28fter is $800 US and the larger is $2000US... so now lets convert that to Aussie $ shall we? so going to Ebay and finding their converter thingy we find that the 28fter will cost $1,048Aus and the 40fter $2620Aus... I couldnt even get an Aussie designer (of some note mind) to do the damned numbers for the keel lead weights for the cost of the 28fter!! So what did I do? I sent it overseas to Nova Scotia and Maine to two professional and very busy NAs who did the numbers for me and within a month I had them all together!!! So why is this??? Its a part of the utter moribund rediculous stupidity of Aussie boats!! The total insanity of the manic destructive nature of the whole mad shamozzle of boatbuildingitis! :eek:

ooh one can get hold of people like Mike Waller and Rob Tayler very easily and their designs are well priced good people too... but unless your into those designs your stuffed!! :mad:

Where are the Aussie designs? Where are the Aussie designers? Where are those Aussies who create something of the beauty of a Fife or a Concordia a Coaster a CC Constellation or even an Elco? Where the blazes are the blighters!!!... I want Aussie originality I want Aussie timbers I want AUSSIE!!! :mad:

And so it goes aahhh maybe theres naught for it but for me to build me redesigned luggar and hope all the numbers are crunched right or even build a Trixen (at 50ft a bloody lifetime project!! :eek: ) and Aussie designers be damned!! gawd sometimes I bloody amaze myself at my ability to say things that phiss me or other people off :eek: ... ah well its a talent I guess

Hey now thats called cross posting I believe Doc Mik!!!

Thanks for the tipoffs ol son!! Will be making contact AS we yarn!

Tis good to see you have a seriass side to ol fella cause we cant always be happy laughable chaps now can we! well some of us do try!!!

Have a good one!

Originally Posted by Wild Dingo

Well Doctor Mik thank you for that... its good to have you on our show... Sorry it took so long but we had to get rid of that yank git Doctor Phil the dill but thats okay... Im glad your here arent we audience?!!

Dammit Dingo - I missed your magnum opus. Actually its too magnum to be a magnum.

Maybe Jeroboam Opus?

There is some good nutty stuff here - nutty - like hard and firm - solid - real - like a 'er nut. Not commenting on your sanity (I know you haven't got one.)

So let me go through the best of it.

why do so many get stuck at the boat plan buying stage?
why do so many take so long to build a boat?

It is the fear of looking like an idiot. Of getting into something that you can't extract yourself from.

That feeling of standing in the middle of class and saying some stupid non fitting answer with everyone looking at you with a mix of blame and pity.

That's why the whole boat thing feels so good at the end - THAT is what we are happy about - we have overcome our own sense of ignorance and limitation.

That's the door that opened for me when I joined a boatbuilding class with Duck Flat what seems like a thousand years ago now. They took away the burden of what materials - they took on the burden of where to build - they took on the burden of what to do if I got stuck.

They took away the problems so I could simply get on with what I wanted to do.

It's exactly like being a young child - the child balances its complete vulnerability with its complete trust in its parents - as it gets older it realises that the parents are pretty limited rather than the omnipotent beings we think they are - lots of us never quite recover from the shock of that discovery.

OK to jump a bit.

I've spent more time than I care to think about painting and maintaining other peoples boats (I build my own and dit it so I DONT have to!).

So picture me up at Midge's house one evening about a couple of months ago with a PD Racer on its side and me sitting on a stool varnishing the inside of the boat. Night and Late and Sitting are pretty poor preconditions for a good job.

Midge came in and saw how the interior of the boat was starting to give the glorious warm glow that is the special quality of varnish - so different from the epoxy underneath.

He asked me "How can you do that - I can do it in perfectly lit conditions and it will look like crap - I'll leave bits unvarnished all over the place?"

My answer was "Because I don't care". And it is true - I have done so much varnishing that I know there is no problem I can't get out of and that any coat I put on will add to the protection of the boat even if I have to put a better one over the top.

So I am not worried by the result - so I can just do it in a very natural and easy way.

Ask me to make a dovetail drawer and I will fall in a gibbering heap!!!!

That's why I build boats - to avoid dovetail drawers.

NO - I won't be stopped by dloody dovetail drawers - they can't be that hard - or maybe I can do something with epoxy and fillets - or what about biscuits and the crosslinked PVAs.

This is what I have learned - that there is always some route around the problem and with a bit of thinking there is possibly even an elegant solution.

You know all about this Dingo because you struggled with restoring that dinghy. That's heaps harder than building it from scratch - true grit - fought like a man. er I mean person of the male persuasion.

With the plethoria of boat designs and boat designers out there today why would someone who in other areas of life is a modern thinker hark back to designs of the early 19th century or earlier? Surely as you and I both know thats rife with trouble!

Without a designer who one can approach contact or whatever how does one get feedback on how theyre going?

When just as easily they could simply contact a living designer and have one drawn up specifically for them?

Also designs from earlier years were often drawn up without any consideration for the home builder and more often than not the drawings were very limited in their content, so how can a home builder knowingly buy with intent to build plans from a long dead designer with only limited information contained in the 4 sheets of drawings they recieve from some obscure museum?

On that matter its usually some foreign museum!
Yes and more often than not some foreign designer!!

Back to my original point. A Builder (to new people the terms in bold have been defined earlier) will know how to work through the above and will regard it as the thrill of the chase - and know that whatever they learn will increase their knowledge and experience - which is a big part of their real motivation - they just love that stuff.

A User who undertakes any of the above is in deep trouble - or even worse - someone might find out that they are a user part way through the project - with a 47ft schooner in frame down the side of their house. For them the knowledge is a means for getting the boat in the water - it is not an end as it is for the Builder.

okay why is it that the most easily available designs are from American designers from places like the Peabody museum Mystic Seaport or from such as the Woodenboat magazine store?

We have been through this one together
http://www.woodworkforums.ubeaut.com...ad.php?t=29957

Where are the great Aussie designs hidden!! why isnt there a collective book of Aussie designs? with contacts!

I realize that some time back someone over east got the gumption up and did do a book on aussie woodenboats with some lines drawings drawings of the many old time Aussie boats... but sadly they left out how to get a hold of the ruddy plans... ahem excuse me Doc Mik but that sort of thing just isnt good enough you know? Surely if your going to offer up a book with long gone designs and names of builders or designers surely where one can get hold of them would have been eerr shall we say useful?

I can tell you who did most of the drawings for that book - a young man (then) by the name of D. Payne. PM me if you have a specific enquiry in mind.

mmmm seems were alone Doc Mik... so why is it deamed a problem if one is more interested in the building process than the actual finishing process?

Why is the journey to complete the boat so all encompassing that the end result often fails to satisfy and the poor boat builder finds themself in such a quandry that he simply starts building another boat?

The work involved in a simple restoration can be immense depending on the level of finish the restorer aims for what drives one to want to restore an old worn out wooden boat

Beautifully put.

Look, one of my favourite people in the universe was Bob Kitchen - now gone. Bob was my boss for many years at the CYCA when I was working on the slipways on and off. Gnarly ex Sapper (engineer) Sgt - gruff, tough, would do anything to help any of his men out. About 5ft 8 and about the same across the chest. He was in his late 60s and had the classic redhead thing of losing his rag and punching out the nearest inert object (usually) which was (usually) the 60 tonne slipping cradle. You could hear the blows from out in the middle of the marina.

He got into sailing because he was stationed in Japan immediately after WW2. Some bright spark had bought up the whole Sydney VS (Vaucluse Senior) fleet and moved it to a warehouse - but hadn't been bright enough to tell anyone in Japan about it. Bob broke into the warehouse and put a boat together out of the bits of several and then spent every leave day sailing by himself around The Inland Sea camping overnight in the boat. Can you imagine what that was like post war? Meeting the local people.

Anyway when I knew him Bob had scraped together enough dough to buy a wonderful Cec Quilkey built Ocean Racer that had proved a dog during the 1970 Admiral's cup trials. And was fixing it up.

It was way beyond his resources in lots of ways but he was making every bit. He made molds for the (what are they called) water and exhaust mixing boxes and made them out of fibreglass rather than buy the 30 dollar plastic ones. He turned all his own skin fittings. They had gone a little "cheap" by Bob's standards when they were finishing the boat and had skimped on quality in some of the bolts. Bob had to replace them - he would head off to use the lathe, carrying some bit of 316 stainless he had scrounged up out of someones propellor shaft or somewhere.

Stay with me guys - this is important stuff - more important than find out what happened in the big brother house tonight.

He had finished painting most of the outside of the boat when he discovered that all the screws in the hull skin were 304 stainless - cold moulded construction - so decided to rip the paint off pull them all out - they were about 9 inches apart over a 42 ft hull - millions of the buggers and he refastened her with the ones that he MADE.

He spent at least 15 years ripping and rebuilding the boat and by that time had moved it (by trailer) up to Lake Macquarie where he lived alone with his rather threadbare German Shepherd.

When I told one of the hot boat riggers ot the CYC that I had dropped in on Bob he said "Bob has really lost the plot". I had to tell the guy that Bob was about ten times happier than himself.

I am sure that at times he was lonely and the boat got to know the feeling of his fists - but ... there endeth the story.

Just be grateful I cut it down to essentials OK - there is much more.

Next Question Please.

Why wouldnt one just simply start building a new one?

Continued in Part 2

Why wouldnt one just simply start building a new one?

Just the wrong question man, just the wrong question - maybe because that's the way its gotta be.

I always try to help people make sensible choices - but so often the sensible choice is not the right choice.

some poor backyard boatbuilder has finally found and bought the design that takes their breath away from some far flung museum designed by some long dead designer who has demanded that the builder use some obscure timbers for the build! timbers available in some far flung corner of outter mongolia but totally out of the question in good old Aussieland, so the poor sods left tryin to figure out what to use instead of White Oak Elm Hickory or some such from our own timber selections! I mean Doc how does one then go about figuring out should I use say Spotted gum instead of Elm or should I use Jarrah maybe some Ironbark would do instead of Purpleheart... and so the poor boatbuilder is now stuck for years in a disastorous situation called boatwood confusionitis often the poor dopey buggar ends up tossing their hands up in frustration.

Look - I just don't get that problem - I don't do "proper" boatbuilding.

If someone wants to build a Rosinante out of Kirri without ribs (replacing them with inside and outside layers of bi-axial glass - hey no probs. I am so far beyond worrying about species - I just deal with densities and gluability - different world.

But when the owner starts talking to me about how he wants to put birdsmouth spars on her - I'll whip his sorry a*s - it is those lovely slender LFH hollow boxes or nothing. If he wants an extra inch of headroom I am happy to sneak the sole lower (it might be just possible) but if he wants to monkey with the sheer or the coachroof I will torch her myself. (or maybe sneak down there at night with a circular saw set to the planking thickness ...). Mention an inboard and he and his family are dead meat.

But at the same time as I say I am not fussed about the species I know that there is no full length timber left on this planet for the planking of this, the lightest and slightest of 29 footers.

.. but where does he find an Aussie boat design of the same vintage that takes his breath away??

Find the plan or boat or photo and go from there. If the full smile and misty eyes are not there settle for something that will bring you a bit of a grin. But just make sure it is not so big that you won't be able to knock it over before you find your true love.

Come on guys, theres a great opening for a witty retort - come on someone.

MIK

And there's still things to talk about it Dingo's other big post above

Sit Doggie
I said Sit
Staaaay - wait for the signal.

Originally Posted by Boatmik

So picture me up at Midge's house one evening about a couple of months ago with a PD Racer on its side and me sitting on a stool varnishing the inside of the boat. Night and Late and Sitting are pretty poor preconditions for a good job.

I went all misty-eyed then, and I did now too!


I happen to know that Mik cares more than he pretends not to, but his words were well taken, and I've used them often since in a few other context's as well!

P