Dec 18, 2005

Jan 5, 2006 - Plastics, Tule and Transforms

Tule Rafts

A few days after the recent rain storms, rafts of debris are floating in the bay. It's all the ususal such as construction lumber and rotted piers. But there's also a lot of tule stalks in the mix.

Rafts of debris in the vicinity of shore, much of it tule stalks.

Tule is one of the materials that the locals used to make boats out of. They would tie a bunch of the stalks together in imaginative ways and turn them into canoes. I can't imagine them being much good in wind, but they must have been good for going out to islands to gather bird eggs and such.

I don't much think of signs, but here in the storm we can imagine a providential message. Tule follows plastic. I am not sure where all the tule stalks came from, there isn't any growing within miles of Alameda. Must be from up in the delta where the flooding has been.

The Future of boat making in a world without oil

Let's imagine boat building without oil. Plastic kayaks are easy. Without oil there wouldn't be any. Plywood boats would also most likely be gone. Aside from the fact that waterproof glues that hold the plywood together are made from oil, the epoxy resin that the boat is covered with would also be gone. Skin on frame boats would also have to be made differently. We would have to lash with leather or plant based string. For skin we would have to abandon nylon and go to cotton or linen cloth. The cloth would be sealed with linseed oil based varnish or paint. Oh well, the recreational boating industry would look different, that's for sure.

Shop transformation

My own location in the space is still up in the air. But in the meantime, I've been taking some panoramas of the inside of the shop. My son turned me on to this cool program called autostitch. You put all your panorama pictures in a folder and then run autostich on them and it finds how they fit together and matches up the edges and runs transforms on them that bends the space and even corrects exposure so all the pictures just blend seamlessly. Here's some examples:

Jan 4, 2006 - New Year

The Storms

After days of rain, it stopped. Gray clouds still hung in the sky, but the air was clear and you could see the opposite shore.

Anyway, I took some pictures of the storm's aftermath in the bay. Not that big of a deal, as I said but we had some high tides as is usual this time of year and combined with the wind, all the garbage that gets hung up on riprap along the bay gets floated by the higher than normal tides and blown by the wind to the windward shore. A lot of the garbage is assorted wood, but some of it is plastic. I imagine that when we run out of oil, you will still be able to go to the beach to get some plastic that you can then melt down and pour in a mold to form the vessel of your choice.

The boat ramp was clogged with assorted driftwood.

Random plastic view 1.

Random plastic view 2. This reminds me of my visit to the Aleutians. Same thing, even out in these remote islands, the beaches are littered with garbage, a lot of it plastic and other man-made crap.

More paddles

Meanwhile, I'm working on two more paddles. Still whittling away on the Bristol Bay replica. Don't know what the lumber species is exactly. The Western Wood Product stamp says HT. Home Depot calls it white wood. But it's tough and stringy, almost like doug fir but not quite as heavy. Anyway, it's long, 103 inches which makes it heavier, but since the wood seems quite tough, I'm making the blades thin to keep the weight down. The paddle also seems to be quite flexible. I have been bending it this way and that and am trying to balance width vs thickness along the blades to encourage even bending. Don't want any spots along the paddle where bending is more and hence the place where the paddle will crack when stressed. What we want is even flex along the blades so that when the paddle wants to break, it can't decide where and so holds off on doing so until stressed a little harder.