What do northern sailors in the wintertime?

[twstoerzinger]

Quantico Frank and I are doing some machine building. Riggerdood Tim is also implicated.
The only sailing in this video is the first minute or two. The rest is all machine shop work.

https://youtu.be/fxYMYVIcnt8

This video is "unlisted" on YouTube meaning you cannot find it by the YouTube search engine, you have to have the above link.

Feel free to pass the link on to anyone you think might be interested.

[Brian N.]

Cool intro with music! Interesting project. I barely have the skills to bend a paper clip and admire engineers and machinists who can fabricate amazing things.

Long island winters are "mild" by some standards. It is March 22 and the Hyacinth, Crocus and Tulips are already pushing up through the soil. No ice on the ponds or pool. It is already 50 degrees at 9:30 am. If it were not for a broken leg, I would be outside doing yard work.

BTW- General question about the forum: Early in the week I composed a post and saved it as a draft. However I can not find how to retrieve it. Any one know how?

[Riggerdood]

Great video Terry!

Trust me folks, my involvement so far has mostly only been brainstorming with Frank and Terry, but it's been fun to "what if". As you can see, Terry's doing most of the "heavy lifting"!

Brian, message drafts are saved under the My Messages tab on the upper left. Post drafts are saved under your profile tab to the left of that. Take a look there, but they do get automatically deleted after 7 days.

[tjspiel]

Love it !

Favorite tidbit from the video was related to snowblowing: "always jibe, never tack". 

A lesson you'd think I would have long since learned but still regularly make that mistake.

[Quantico Frank]

For whatever reason, I've found myself doing a fair amount of metal work recently, mostly trying to accommodate (or recover from) my Rudder Craft rudder/mast crutch combination (which they no longer sell) which has obviously turned out way too heavy for my stock Precision pintles and maybe transom. Fortunately, I didn't destroy my transom, but I've gone through two sets of OEM pintles. The first time I destroyed a set of pintles it was at least partially my fault because I didn't diagonally brace the rudder/mast crutch combination to the hull when trailering. So I fixed the diagonal bracing issue and increased the strength of the pintles with some 316 SS braces I made (!!!) myself. The second time, the vertical weight of the rudder/mast crutch combination literally crushed the OEM pintles. The solution I came up with with a WHOLE LOT of Tim's help and thinking was to permanently separate the Rudder Craft mast crutch from the rudder/tiller assembly so the latter would no longer bear on the pintles for trailering. That necessitated NEW 316 SS brackets and pintle braces that I had to fabricate, and apparently that has solved my problem with the pintles once and for all.

On the Trailer Sailor Happy Hour that we have every other Friday, I have sometimes brought up what I'm doing, and it's been known for some time that Terry knows A LOT OF STUFF about these things. On occasions in the past, we have reserved some of our most technical questions for Terry. So when I was thinking about this contraption that it would be great to have that's portable that I could take outside to slowly turn bowls or spindles for high-fume (VOC) finishing, I wrote to Terry to see if he had any suggestions. Terry took it on as a challenge. And he obviously had the knowledge to make it work. So we all three, Terry, Tim, and I have taken on this madcap science project, and Terry is the one who is making it all work. There is some serious horse trading going on-- my finished products-- turned bowls and other things I make, for flat-out machine parts that Terry makes! We've all had a blast in the process. I will attempt to post some pictures of what's going on, including what I did to solve my rudder/tiller/mast crutch problem in a separate post.

[Riggerdood]

Frank, I sent you this, but here it is for the benefit of all. Regarding posting pics on here, this topic was covered extensively on the old forum, and here's my best synopsis of how to do it here. Any and all comments/suggestions/workarounds gladly welcomed!

This didn't used to work in quick reply, but I've never tried it there.

1. Start your post/reply. Put the cursor where you want to insert the pic.

2. Click where it says Click or drag files here to attach them.

3. Go to the folder where your image is and double click on the file. Remember: the max size is 1024 KB, so you might need to reduce the size in Paint or a similar program. Basically 1 MB is the goal.

4. Once you have a "legal" file, you have to click on the little blue "arrow up to a line" icon. Then you have to specify width and height in pixels. This can be kind of a guessing game, but for a ~1 MB image, 500 - 1000 seems to work well. Make sure to use the same number for width/height if you don't want your pic distorted.

5. Click insert, then preview. If you want to increase/decrease the size the image appears in the post, you can edit the line of code that was placed in your post. For example (brackets at either end removed for clarity):

attach id=7336 width=500 height=500]file name[/attach

can be changed to

attach id=7336 width=1000 height=1000]file name[/attach

Somewhere in the 500 - 1000 range seems to be best for a ~1 MB file. Just keep previewing until you like it.

6. You can repeat all this for up to 15 MB worth of pics, or basically 15 pics per post/reply. Just make sure to place the cursor where you want to pic to go, and also add extra empty lines between pics/pics and pics/text. And always preview the final thing before hitting post.

Hope this helps!