As some of you may or may not know my wife and I are working through the process of building a boat. We are very early in the process. Nothing is actually built yet. We have a design that is almost perfect for our needs. We have had discussions with the designer about what it will cost in design fees to make it perfect. and then what it will cost extra to get all the hull plates rendered into CNC files to be cut out on a giant plasma cutter.

Now, in theory, I am trained in boat design and building. In fact I have designed and built boats. However, they have all been under twenty feet and made of wood. Plywood mostly. In fact I am a pretty good small plywood boat designer and builder. The problem here is: I know jack about designing and building steel boats. I know slightly more than jack about putting interiors in steel boats. I have fallen deeply in love with the concept of a well designed and constructed Steel yacht.

So I have gone to a designer who:

Has four decades or so of building boats

Steel ones

tugs, small island freighters, and private yachts that resemble same.

that has lived a board a boat of some sort for most of those four decades

makes a habit of designing interiors that meant to be lived in not just visited on the weekend

has some experience in the type of construction I wish to do

has a good relationship with the companies who will do the thingd I want done.

has a stock plan that is within five or six hours of drafting time of the boat I want.

His name is Jay Benford.
There is a wonderful website for a boat that may be the first one built the way that I intend to. They detail it in pretty decent photos on the site. The actual constructor of the boat was Custom Steel Boats They have some wonderful photos on their site and a pretty description of the process used. The gist of it is this. Somebody (like this company) takes the plans and lofts (which means make fullsize patterns for the pieces of the boat) them into NC files for use by a company that specializes in cutting out bits of steel with computer controlled plasmacutters. the company who cuts them out would ideally cut the steel out of pieces that are pre sandblasted and preprimed with a weldable primer. This means that when you finish the boat you don't have to sandblast the entire boat, just the weld seams, saving both the labor and the problem of what to do with a hull with several hundred pounds of sand in the bilge. the cutting company then ships the whole lot to you (or your builder) with appropriate tab A into Slot B markings for your assembly. Once it welded and the seams are blasted and re-primed, the bilge sump is coated with several coats of epoxy to keep the boat from rusting from the inside out(which, incidentally is the most common way steel yachts die). The entire rest of the interior is covered with a couple inches of sprayed in place foam(not altogether unlike the stuff you might us to seal that bad patch of siding behind the gutters where nobody can see( go ahead deny it but you and I both know it's there)). The foam does several things all of them good:

it also seals the steel and prevents it from rusting from the inside out,

it prevents most of the condensation that would normally occur in a metal boat(many people who have uninsulated metal boats refer to the interior as "the rainforest"),

it keeps the interior cool in the summer and warm in the winter( surely you must know someone that has licked a steel flagpole in the winter?)

The exterior of the boat then gets primed with an epoxy primer and painted above the waterline with a pretty two part polyurethane, and below the waterline with a paint nasty enough to kill barnacles and the like(I should probably note at this point that I make my living selling just this sort of stuff and I'm damn good at it). Now you have something that looks like a boat. Now you get to spend about twice as much time as you have spent so far fitting in an interior putting a rig on it, probably an engine too unless you are some kind of nutjob purist. So let's make it three times as much as you have put in so far. But right now it looks like a boat so go ahead and woohoo if you need to.

In the process of researching this whole process I felt I needed to learn how to weld. I kind of know now but just the sort of stuff you do on a farm on an antique arc welder that is powered by the engine of the very same tractor you are trying to weld. certainly not the sort of professional look I would be going for here. So here are a bunch of links that I found to larn ya the theory and practice of bonding metals.

For those of you that don't know I have recently switched from my previously and tenaciously held view that privacy is a must have freedom that is to be defended at all cost with every thing from crypto to violent revolution. I have switched over to David Brin's image of a Transparent Society". It's a concept put forth convincingly in both his novel Earth and his nonfiction book The Transparent Society. Go out and take the time to read these (and I do mean time. Earth took me two weeks and I go through books like the folks down on genessee street go through Crack), but the gist of the idea is this. In a world where noone has privacy not even and ESPECIALLY governments we could all trust that what we say is happening is really happening and begin to hold individuals, corporations, and governments responsible for their actions. With accountability comes a sort of freedom we have only imagined in large scale but have never seen. The anarchists dream society. You can do whatever you want as long as you are willing to be held accountable for your actions. You can even listen to an hour and not quite twenty minutes of Neal Stephenson trying to sell Brin's idea over dinner at CFP in Toronto if you are still not sold on the idea.
Now I don't for even one second think this will be an easy task. even brin depicted the rest of us bombing Switzerland flat as Kansas in an attempt get them to sign the treaty of openness. I think something not quite as drastic would be needed for our government to let go of it's pathological need to keep secrets as well. In the meantime there are some people already starting to push in the own quiet way for openness.
Now there is one character in the news lately who has taken this to quite an extreme. Unfortunately for both him and us, he is possessed of a case of terminal can'tshuthisdamntrapitis and has not surprisingly fallen afoul of the feds. They have an extremely weak interstate stalking case against him for attempting to collect just exactly the sort of information that would be needed in the hands of citizens to make good decisions in holding our civil servants accountable for their actions. Unfortunate for him because he is probably going to go down for a crime he either didn't commit or isn't actually a crime. unfortunate for us because those of us less extreme in our views will have this awful precedent set and it will make it much more difficult for us to assemble accountability mechanisms that don't involve hunting down and killing bad people.
There are still some permanent accountability options but I'll leave that discussion to another post.
Given these type of situations I am not about to be giving up my encryption tools just this moment.

about a month or so ago I was reading a piece by Che Guevara, Man and Socialism in Cuba(it's available for the palm from Memoware. It was one of the last things he had published before the Company had his head and hands buried separately. For those of you not familiar with Che and his writings He was brilliant man who hated several sorts of go for the jugular capitalism. In the part of argentina he grew up in he was exposed to it from several directions. His father was at different points in his life a wealthy landowner and at other points a shiftless jobless poor layabout.(some of this was brought about by the failed boatbuilding business owned by his father's cousin German Frers(yes that German Frers)). Any how he was a brilliant guerilla organizer who in spite of a pretty terrible asthma condition was also a passable jungle fighter in his own right. He will probably be forever remembered as the guy who got Fidel a job. If you look deeper you will find that he wasn't much of a communist. Fellow traveller yeah probably but in fact a pretty shitty marxist. (damn good thing too!, as that crap certianly didn't work out like they thought) Any how the point of this whole intro is to highlight a few quotes from this last little article and point out that as Che was predicting how communism would fail That he turned out to be right fucking on the money.

We can attempt to graft elm trees so that they bear pears, but at the same time we must plant pear trees.

Translated "you can remove despots and even temporarily replace a despot with another more to your liking but if you don't have a better plan you're gonna starve"

Our job is to keep the present generation, maladjusted by its conflicts, from becoming perverted and perverting the new generations. We do not want to create salaried workers docile to official thinking nor "fellows" who live under the wing of the budget, exercising freedom in quotation marks.

I don't even think I need to translate that one. Right on the money.

If a man thinks that in order to devote his entire life to the revolution, he cannot be distracted by the worry that one of his children lacks a certain article, that the children's shoes are in poor condition, that his family lacks some necessary item, with this reasoning, the seeds of future corruption are allowed to filter through.

It is awful tough to continue a revolution when you have infront of you solid proof that while you have thrown of the yoke of oppression you're children are starving and those still "oppressed" are having no trouble feeding their kids and indeed even buying them jeans and playstations.


Come to think of it maybe it wasn't the CIA that had him wacked. It might've been Fidel.

yes it's been awhile. and now you're going to get a great big pile of linked goodness.