The Roger B. Smith Design Award Goes to ...

My Ryobi R1801M router is a piece of crap. I think the intentions of the designers were honorable, but in the interest of economy, they made the screw mechanism which you use to set the depth of the router bit out of plastic. Nothing wrong with plastic of course except that in this case, the plastic of the screw mechanism reacts with the sap in the sawdust and glues the screw mechanism shut so you can no longer adjust bit depth thereby rendering the whole router useless, unless you don't care how deep you rout something.
My solution was fairly simple. I took a Dremel tool with a cutoff bit to the router and cut through the plastic screw collar, peeled it loose from the body of the router to which it had glued itself and then was once again able to turn the screw collar and adjust router depth.
This operation had all the subtlety of a frontal lobotomy performed with a screw driver, but it was effective.


In case you're wondering who Roger B. Smith was, he was the CEO of GM for most of the 1980's. He tried to make GM profitable by cutting down on quality. Given that he was an accountant by training and not an engineer, this no doubt seemed like a reasonable approach to him. If you sell millions of cars per year and you can save a few bucks per car by cutting corners on quality, you can save yourself a few million bucks.
No doubt the good folks at Ryobi were inspired by the example of Roger B. Smith and decided to save money by using plastic for the screw mechanism instead of metal, thereby boosting the profitability of the company and the approval of Mr. Smith from beyond the grave.
..
But wait, there's more: I just went to the RYOBI web site www.ryobi.com. This site is even more lame than their power tools. On the other hand, they seem to have hired some American ad agency to sell tools to women and have this woman with the suspect name of Norma Vally who seems to be the mascot for their chixcanfix website http://www.chixcanfix.com/ Picture of Norma below - picture pulled off the website - it comes in three parts, norma_top.jpg, norma_mid and norma_bottom.jpg. Any failure of the parts to align is entirely due to limitations of the blogger software which auto-sizes all graphics.

Pt. Hope Kayak Revisited

Two days ago the wind was blowing straight out of the west and whipping up whitecaps. So I thought it was time to give the Pt. Hope boat another try. As you may remember, its flatwater performance was unremarkable. Because the boat is short it has no glide. Because the keel line sweeps up at the stern, it does not track well. And because the bow is fairly blunt, the boat pushes a fair amount of water.
But I suspected that all these apparent faults might turn out to be virtues under the proper conditions. And in wind and short chop they were. The boat seemed to be just the right length for short steep wind waves. It rose nicely to the waves. The full bow no doubt helped as did the upswept keel line at the stern. At no point did the bow punch into an oncoming wave. By the same token, lack of glide in chop was not an issue. I don't think any kayak would have much glide in such conditions. And tracking was not an issue either. The wind and the waves were pushing the boat around to such an extent that lack of tracking wasn't noticeable.
So all in all, the boat was well behaved in rough water. I suspect that these were the conditions that it was designed for.

Almquist Lumber 2nd Annual Wooden Boat Show

I have been invited to come up to Arcata for the second annual wooden boat show put on by Almquist lumber. The date is May 17 for anyone wanting to stop by and talk skinboat. Check out the website at http://www.almquistlumber.com/boatwoods.html
While up there, I will be checking out Trinidad for suitability as a TAKS site. Then, end of June, I will be back and doing a Greenland boatbuilding course. More on that to come.

TAKS 2008, The Blue Water Symposium

TAKS 2008 is coming up in October. For those of you who don't know what TAKS is, it's the Traditional Arctic Kayak Symposium. This year, we're looking at three possible sites for the symposium. There is of course San Simeon where we had it the last two years, but this year, we're also looking at Mendocino and Trinidad, which is north of Arcata. Mendocino is about 3.5 hours north of San Francisco. Trinidad is 6 hours north of San Francisco.
John Petersen is headed up to Mendo today, Tuesday. He's going to check it out to consider suitability for TAKS. He will also head up to Trinidad a day or so later to check it out. Stay tuned, as they say for more info.

John Petersen and furry friend on the way up to Mendocino.

I will be headed up to Arcata in May to check it out and will try to swing by Mendocino. Both are no doubt cool places.
We are also trying out slogans for TAKS. Somebody pointed out that TAKS is one of the few of these kind of events that happens on the open coast with the attendant surf and potentially rough conditions. So we're playing around with that idea - the blue water symposium.
So we still don't know where the symposium will be this year, but it will be October 3, 4 and 5.

Sandbagging

See a few posts back for seaworthiness. Seaworthiness has something to do with stability and stability is aided by a low center of gravity. But heavier boats glide better as well because they have greater momentum than a lighter boat at the same speed. So we're hoping that you can make your kayak heavier and therefore more seaworthy. The Aleuts reportedly carried ballast in their kayaks, ballast equaling roughly the weight of their kayaks.
So today I went out in my Aleut kayak and brought along one of those three sandbags pictured above. These guys weigh about 35 pound apiece. The idea was to place a sandbag in back of the cockpit to see how that would affect handling of the kayak. First of all, 35 pounds is fairly heavy and hard to push around in a boat with ribs. 15 pound sand bags might be a better choice. Not only is 35 pounds heavy, but it's also too big and hard to get into a tight boat.
But on to the effect of 35 pounds on handling. As expected, a heavier boat is harder to accelerate. I was expecting the effect to be negligible, but instead, it was noticable. Glide improves, I suppose but paddling definitely takes more effort with a heavier boat. I had been hoping that the extra weight would affect mostly acceleration, but it affects cruising at constant speed as well. I suppose. Wetted surface increases as does the amount of water that needs to be pushed out of the way by a heavier boat. All in all, extra ballast on flat water is mostly an annoyance. Whatever is gained isn't worth the extra effort.
But I'm still holding out for improved performance in rough water. I'll have to give the sandbags another try next time the wind blows.

The Olive Drab Helicopters

Lots of noise outside yesterday. So I looked and found these helicopters hanging around the gray ships of the reserve fleet. Big helicopters. It occurred to me today that it would be hard to keep these sort of things going on recycled frenchfry oil. Of course, if I was in the military, I wouldn't mind being the guy that drives up to the backs of ethnic restaurants to collect the used oil. Come to think of it, my job in the army was kind of like that. I was the guy who drove around the country side to fetch and deliver, sort of the company gofer. Meanwhile, while the petroleum lasts, we fire these things up with more conventional petrofuels.

Looks kind of like a dragonfly doesn't it?

Paddle Decorations

I made a paddle for one of the local paddlers. He wanted decorations on it. I did a NW Coast design for him. In the process, I also did a few extra designs just to play around. The designs came from a book on native tattoos. I'm thinking of coming up with a bunch of these images suitable for a kayak paddle in case people want their paddles personalized.

This is an eagle - see claws at the bottom. Looked more like a crab to me at first glance, but really, it's an eagle. The interesting thing I found out as part of my research is that 2D art of the NW uses a lot of standard pictorial elements for making up pictures, like the oval or the oval with a little dart in it and so on. It's almost like forming words out of limited number of letters, only it's done in 2D and scaled to various sizes.

The bishop. I like this one for some reason. I think it's because of its iconic simplicity.

Wood Gathering

I almost finished my driftwood kayak rack earlier this week but was a few sticks short of a complete rack. So off to the Alameda driftwood repository at a secluded part of the island. This particular part of the island is situated in such a way that late winter high tides co-inciding with storms blowing from the south pile up consideral amounts of lumber on top of the riprap that re-enforces that part of the shore. Pictures follow. Ice plants were in bloom and the view was unusually lovely. I managed to find two 2x6x10's nailed together, threw them in the water and towed them back to the shop. Successful outing.


The view toward the bay bridge. The pictures turned out blurry. I had the camera inside my pfd. Must have fogged up the lens. Still, the flowers are pretty in an impressionistic sort of way. The dark blue blob to the right of the bridge is Yerba Buena Island. The light blue blob in back of the bridge is Mt. Tamalpais.


Here's the wood, all shapes and sizes.

Seaworthiness

I just picked up a book called Seaworthiness, The Forgotten Factor, by C.A. Marchaj at one of the local used bookstores. The prose is a little dense but the author has a lot of good things to say. The author's premise is essentially that yacht racing has forced the design of racing yachts toward speed at the expense of seaworthiness and comfort. And unfortunately, racing fashions also seem to set the tone for cruising yacht design. The book was published in 1986 and it is quite possible that things have changed, but I suspect not much. Fashion after all trumps function every time. So the book focuses not on what makes a boat fast, the prime concern of racers but rather on what makes a boat seaworthy, the thing that should be of prime concern to the cruising yachtsman.
So why do I read books about sailboats when I am a builder of kayaks? Two reasons: one is that I am starting to get interested in sailing and two that the study of kayak performance seems restricted to stability measurements on flat water and hull efficiency in tow tests. Another way of putting point two is that the only two things that kayak designers have any measure for is how far you can lean a kayak before it capsizes and how much resistance it offers to towing at various speeds. If you want to know how boats behave in other than flat water, you have to look beyond the kayak literature.
And so it came as a pleasant surprise to find C.A. Marchaj's book on seaworthiness. Here was chapter after chapter of examination not only how a boat behaves in waves, but also how a boat behaves at various degrees of heel. Not all of this stuff applies to kayaks, but most of it at least gets a reader like me thinking about how kayaks and sailboats are different. But they are also the same in some ways. Forces that apply to one apply to the other. The question is what does one want to do about them and what sort of strategy works for a kayak but against a sailboat and vice versa. But above all, the book adds a third dimension to the discussion of how a boat behaves on water. A boat moves not just forward and backward and sideways, but up and down as well. Hull shape needs to take into consideration not just the movement on a flat surface but the movement in a vertical direction as well.
Perhaps the greatest difference between a sailboat and a kayak is that sailboats in general are not meant to be inverted, that is, capsized. They are not built for complete inversion. Once they go past a certain angle of heel, they are likely to flood and sink. Not so a kayak. A kayak is so unstable in general that occasional inversion is generally expected and planned for. Surfing likewise is dangerous to sailboats but kayakers often seek out surf and when they do, they are likely to do so in kayaks that are especially designed for the surf.
But the majority of recreational kayakers want to move about the surface of the water just like their sailboating cousins, that is without unplanned inversion while covering adequate distances. It is for these sort of kayaking conditions that Marchaj's book is instructive. That is to say, it attempts to answer the question, how can we built boats that behave well in rough water and avoid capsize. As such, it is a useful book even for the kayak builder.

Sunset Cruise on the Bay

Sunday I went out on Tim Anderson's Free Yacht. See here for more details on how he got this free yacht.

Tim is a first rate scrounger and thus an embodiment of the skinboat ethic. The skinboat ethic is that nothing should be bought that can be scrounged. It's not every skinboat builder's ethic, but it is mine and it used to be the ethic of the original skinboat builders. Not that they had a choice. They had to build their boats out of found materials. We don't. Nowadays they don't either. And so they don't. Tim taking a call.

This was a sunset cruise. Start out at about 5:30 and go till sunset at about 7:30.

The sun being close to setting, the golden gate toward the left.

I don't know anything about sailing, but it seems like the trimaran has certain assets, the main being that it is wide and so there is not much of the usual heeling over and scrambling to stay more or less upright that you get with keel boats. Given this property, there is not so much of the usual annoying scrambling about. One can settle into a spot and stay there.
Another asset of the trimaran is relatively shallow draft. One does not have to worry as much about running aground on mud flats and resting there until the tide comes in again.

Tim took a bunch of people aboard for this cruise, something like 18 and we all fit comfortably on the deck. Different people took turns at the tiller, steering the boat this way and that. Sailing is a pleasant activity, provided where one aims to go can be gotten to by a zigzag course. Our intention was to head over to Treasure Island to pick someone up, but the wind was directly off Treasure island and so the tacks were long and didn't produce much forward progress. Not much one can do about that. But anyway, we ran out of time and turned back to run before the wind toward the harbor in Emeryville.

It was nice to be out on the water and have the wind in our face. All in all an experience that is the perfect antidote to life in the city and all its discontents.

How's the Book Coming, Part zero?

Every few weeks or so, I get email asking me how the new version of The Aleutian Kayak is coming. Then I type something to the effect that I have taken all the photos and have written a good deal of it and have all the chapters in place and all that's left is editing and more artwork - line drawings and then layout and so on.
If you've ever done a book or pamphlet or anything of the type, you know that that means the book is only about halfway done. If it were text only, a month of sequestration and lots of coffee in the morning and beers in the afternoon and a sore butt and calloused fingers later and the thing could be done. But it's more complex than that. Every time I sit down to work on the book, new ideas arise and I go off on making notes for new stuff to add to the book or revise stuff I've already written. At that rate, the book will never be finished. My wife perceives my dilemma accurately. Recently she asked me what I was doing and I said, working on the book. And she said, oh yes, the never ending book project.
But honestly, I want to finish this thing. For one thing, people want me to write this book. For another, I have more good info to share since the first version. After all, a decade and a half have passed.
No doubt you can't wait to hear what the real reason for the three-part keelson is, or the bifurcated bow, or the bones or the transom stern. All these mysteries will be turned into non-mysteries by the new book.
So anyway, keep writing me and asking me how the book is coming, because the more people I tell that it will be finished soon, the greater the pressure will be to actually finish it.
And someone at SSTIKS 2006 told me that they thought the first version was funny. I promise you, the next version will be even funnier. I don't remember putting any jokes in the book. The humor must have been unintentional. Still, if people want funny, I'm willing to give it a try.

Survival at Sea, Update

See below for pictures of three survival at sea books that I posted about. I've read two of them completely now and skipped ahead to the end on the third book.
First of all, the fact that these are true account type books ruins the suspense. You know that these people will get rescued eventually or arrive safely on land. So you read a day by day account of thirst, hunger and increasing weakness and encounters with storms and so on, but after about half a book's worth of that, you want to skip ahead to the last chapter.
But secondly, and this is a valuable lesson for anyone who finds themselves lost. In all three of these books, there was at least one person who had some sense of navigation and where they were and where they wanted to head. They were not aimlessly drifting. They tried to control their progress, so that even if they couldn't steer their rafts, they put out a sea anchor when the wind was blowing the wrong way. But more importantly perhaps, having some idea of where they were gave them an important morale boost because they all had hopes of arriving somewhere at some point so that their situation wouldn't seem hopeless. And when they did have some food and water, they knew how long it would have to last. Lacking a goal, their survival would have been much less likely.

Chandleries

When I need to buy boaty stuff, mostly exotic plastic string, I go to the local chandleries, of which we have two. Pictures below. Mostly, I avoid these places since as anyone who has ever worked on a boat knows, if it's used on a boat it's twice as expensive as the same thing used on land. But it's not my point to gripe here. It's more about pointing out that Alamed is a two of town, kind of like the ark, it has two of every kind of business, two McDonalds', two voodoo candle stores, two Walgreens and of course two chandleries. Just thought I'd share photos.
This is the West Marine store, a chain housed in what looks like it used to be a supermarket.
And this is Svendsen's, housed next to a marina where people are forever sanding fiberglass and applying more epoxy.

Plastic Fantastic Container Bloat

Don't get me wrong; it's nice that when I buy a tool, it comes in a container. Makes it easier to carry to the imaginary job site. But storage racks at the boat shop were getting crowded and I had to figure out ways to free up some space, I found that the easiest way to do it was to take tools out of their plastic boxes and store them directly on the shelf or in a drawer sans box. Instant space savings of up to 90 %. The thing with these gizmo boxes is that they're mostly trapped air with little actual usable space. This Dremel box does the best job of looking like some sort of George Lucas Spaceship fantasy. And who has time to put each little accessory back exactly in the place where it is supposed to go and wind the cord just right so it fits in its little cubby?

This box with the router bits does the best job of wasting space. It wins the award for most space saved when I tossed it.
And the worst sin of these boxes is that if the tool breaks or wears out, the box is so oddly shaped that it's useless for storing anything else.

Logo Wear

I'm helping a friend install display panels at a sporting goods manufacturer's new headquarters. The manufacturer has been eminently successful and needed to expand their offices. I've heard of the brand before. I'm not sure what all they make. I think tents are in their lineup of goods. But like many of these outfits, they have discovered that the real money is in the rag trade, that is, clothing. And the clothing is outrageousely expensive. And each item of clothing is prominently emblazoned with the manufacturer's logo. This is nothing new of course. But like many things, one needs to see it in the flesh, at the source, to fully comprehend the physical reality of it.
The formula for companies like this one seems to be as follows. Make some high quality sports gear which attracts a following, establish a recognizeable logo and then put that logo on everything from baseball caps to shirts to shorts to windbreakers to shoes. There's a finite amount of money in selling tents or rock climbing gear or whatever, but an almost unlimited amount of money in selling clothes.
So the business model for kayak builders would be to create an attractive brand of kayak with a distinctive logo, then sell clothes with that logo on it. Then make more money selling clothes than kayaks to where you can make the kayaks just as a sideline to maintain the illusion that your business is about adventure rather than clothes.
Kayak logo wear anyone?

Survival at Sea

A friend of mine mentioned that he would be doing some extended sailing in a catamaran of his own construction. He has done extensive voyages before and run into some problems. This time he is reading up on survival at sea before taking off. I offered to lend him some books from my own survival at sea library. I had them sitting on the shelf but never actually read them. So I decided it was time to read them.


I got this book at Ralph Freese's Chicagoland canoe base. The canoe whose journey is chronicled by this book was sitting out back of Ralph's shop. This isn't a shipwreck story. The author intentionally set out to cross the Atlantic with a canoe and outrigger. But his radio and navigation equipment quits on him and the adventure begins. The author runs short of food and water at some point but is in the shipping lanes and flags down ships who give him food and water. The sailors in the other books weren't as fortunate. They were not in the shipping lanes and got no outside assistance.

The raft is the story of three navy men in a 4 x 8 foot raft floating about for 43 days before they find land. This story takes place during WWII and their journey is complicated by the fact that they want to be picked up or find land, but the ship might be Japanese or the land, Japan occupied. In either case, these sailors fear for their lives.


A family sailing somewhere to the west of the Galapagos islands has their boat rammed by killer whales which put a hole in their boat and caused it to sink. After that, they drift about in a raft and dinghy. Later the raft sinks and all of them end up in the dinghy.

All three books are good reading and anybody who goes out on big water in kayaks will get something out of these books. The stories are scary but also instructive. Survival at sea is possible.

Elevated Storage

Addendum:
the black and white images are all from the U of Alaska, Fairbanks archives. I checked their website and there was no mention of special permissions to use the photos. Generally, museums are hard up for money and try to make some by selling rights for use of their photos for commercial use. Anyway, I aim to pursue this issue to set my mind at rest for future reference and whether or not to pull these photos off the blog in case permission is not forthcoming.
End of Addendum

I go vertical to maximize storage space at the shop. But elevated storage is nothing new. People of the Arctic were always fond of vertical storage. But it wasn't so much to save space as to keep animals from chewing on their stuff. Still, regardless of intent, the look is similar.



A sealskin poke hoisted on ropes.

And kayak gear hoisted into the rafters.



And boat yards then and now.

Pt. Hope Kayak

Not too long ago, I finished a Pt. Hope kayak. Above is a picture of the frame, finished except for a coat of red paint and a cockpit coaming. Below is a picture of the boat floating empty. For those of you not up to date on Alaskan geography, Pt. Hope is on the Arctic Ocean, north and east of the Bering Strait that separates Siberia from Alaska and about 300 miles southwest of Pt. Barrow, Alaska's nothernmost settlement. Check it out on Google or one of those other map programs.

It's a short boat, 13 feet long and it has a lot of rocker. As you can see, the first and the last two feet of the boat don't even touch water when the boat is empty. When the boat has me in it, that's a different story.
Short performance summary: This boat has no directional stability. It paddles straight as long as you paddle. Once you stop though, it wants to turn to one side or the other. When the boat is empty, you can push on either end and it rotates on its own axis. The same goes for when you're in the boat. You sweep your paddle and the boat spins on its axis. Turning radius: 7 ft. I imagined this to be a good bay boat for short choppy conditions, one to two foot waves. Those will be coming along soon. I'll report back after I've paddled some of those.

How Long is Long

This is not SPAM. We're not talking manhood here. We're talking paddle length.
Back about a decade or so, John Heath published an article in Sea Kayaker mag on Greenland paddles and their anthropometrics. Ever since then, when you show a paddle to anyone, they reach over their head with their arm outstretched and their fingers curled over at the first joint from the tip and tell you that that's how long a paddle ought to be.
Yeah maybe. That's a good start if you're 5' 6" tall and paddle a Greenland boat with a 21 inch beam with a deck that's almost flat. If you paddle a boat that's wider or deeper or you're taller or shorter or you don't paddle for a living, you might want a paddle of a different length.
There are some websites that have developed algorithms for determining the right length of paddle for you. You answer about 20 questions like how wide your boat is, how fit you are, how strong you are, how tall you are and so on and then tell you what length your paddle should be. Maybe.
The truth of it is, there is no magic formula to determine what length of paddle is just right for you. Judging by the paddles that people are using and the results they're getting, people are not getting good advice on paddle sizing. The only way I think that you can get the right paddle for yourself is to try a bunch of different paddles and see what feels right to you. And nothing ever stays the same. The more you paddle, the stronger you get and the kind of paddle you can handle changes. If you get a boat with different dimensions, chances are, you need a different paddle.
So anyway, all this is a long pre-amble to the topic of long paddles. If I use the Heath anthropometrics, I get a Greenland paddle that's 87 inches long. But we know that the Greenlanders weren't the only ones making paddles. I used to make my Aleut paddles about 90 to 92 inches long. But some people with wide boats and people who felt more comfortable with a slower paddling cadence wanted paddles that were even longer. I made one Aleut paddle 102 inches long. But most recently, in corresponding with Jeffrey Dickrell of Unalaska, I found out that Aleuts made paddles that were even longer. I won't go into details here because Jeff has an article coming out in Sea Kayaker mag on the topic of long paddles and I'm going to hold off on posting any pictures until after his article is published, but in any case, I've made a nine foot long (108") and a ten foot (120") long paddle for purposes of testing the long paddle idea. Results will be posted in the not too distant future.


So here's a photo of the nine footer being glued up. I used redwood which has similar strength and density characteristics to red cedar and is available in discount lumber stores. The Aleuts supposedly used western red cedar for their paddles. Given the dimensions that they built them to, I'm not surprised.

Outrigger Canoe

This is a picture of Matt in an outrigger canoe fashioned of salvaged floatation and a skin on frame canoe. The booms are salvaged 2 by fours cut down slightly to save on weight. Anyway, this scheme allows one to stand up in the canoe, drink beer, etc. Stuff you wouldn't want to do if this thing didn't have an outrigger.
Matt is standing behind his tripod. We had been floating around Alameda's seaplane lagoon with me lounging in the bow and Matt shooting video of me talking. He's doing a video of various people who are self employed doing things they like. The idea behind the video is that young people who can't quite figure out how to make a living doing what they like can get some inspiration and ideas from people who are doing what they like.

Now here's a photo of a Hawaiian outrigger canoe paddled by a crew of six. They should probably be sailing this thing instead of paddling, but I think they all have desk jobs and need the exercise.

Off to the left in the foreground is Dave in his Greenland style skin boat and behind him, David in an Aleut Baidarka. This was the baidarka's maiden voyage. David needed to adjust the seat on his boat and we all wanted to get on the beach and stretch a little.

The outrigger people told me that there's something like 3000 people in the SF Bay Area paddling outrigger canoes. Popular sport.