SMHRB is a group dedicated to fixing the varied multitude of small (and not-so-small) problems and issues that come with owning any house, with an eye towards intelligent improvement at all times. Even the best ideas of previous home owners can have horrible results if not done correctly, resulting in what we commonly refer to as "Teh Stupid". One of our collective hopes is to not add the list of things that later needs more attention - band-aid solutions are never the best way to go.
And sometimes we just shoot the breeze and try to answer any random questions the best we can. More after coffee and the orange Danish. If you have orange coffee, you need to brew a new pot.
Launching day! In the very early morning (time and tide wait for no man!), several hundred people gathered to watch a new boat float for the first time. As is traditional, there was a lot of ceremony. At 5:00, people were already getting strong drinks from the open bar and scarfing down doughnuts. A color guard brought in flags, and the national anthem was sung. The governor gave a speech and a letter from a senator was read. The owner said some kind words about the shipyard and designers. A priest sprinkled holy water and gave a blessing. The owner's wife broke a bottle of champagne over the bow as the trigger plates were cut. The boat slid quietly down the greased launchways into the cold water of Commencement Bay, to the cheers of the assembled crowd. It was caught by two tugs before it crossed the channel and ended up on a condo owner's front porch.
This is the view from inside the shop:
And this is from outside. I was in the crowd along the pier to the left of the big crane. You can see the boat start to float free at about 0:17.
This is the culmination of about a year's work in the office and the shipyard. My office did the design work on the boat, essentially making a gigantic puzzle of cut parts for the shipyard to assemble. It's a little bigger puzzle than most. The part of the boat that fit in the building shed (deckhouse and pilothouse have been added since it was launched) is 184' long and 42' wide. The bunting in the first video is 34 feet above the bottom of the keel. It was broken into 21 modules or subassemblies, and had a total of about 15,000 pieces laid out on 350 10' x 40' sheets of steel. We produced just shy of 600 assembly drawings showing how to put the 1.6 million pounds of steel together. Think the balsa T Rex skeleton you bought your nephew for his birthday, but on a grand scale.
This is about a $20-30 million investment on the owner's part. The engines came from Illinois, the steel, refrigeration equipment, and processing equipment were all bought locally, and it employed about 80 people were employed full time for a year in the shipyard alone. That doesn't count all of the craftsmen employed by lcoal and US vendors. The marine industry is one of the last protected industries in the United States. Every boat that trades between US ports of fishes within 200 miles of shore is US-built, US-owned, and US-crewed. If you hear about Congress trying to weaken the Jones Act, they would make sure that the next boat like this would be built in China instead of Tacoma.
If you happen to live in the Pacific Northwest, you might get fish from this boat if you order fish and chips at the Ivar's chain this summer. The company that owns this boat is the sole source for Ivar's cod.
Anyway, that's enough about the boat. What are you working on this weekend?