I realized that except for the spam faxes, I have not gotten a work related fax in over a year. It must be a sign of the times. Its all the web and email now.
I am dropping that line and the fax number, 206-283-4106.

I attended the Build Small, Live Large summit in Portland, OR last weekend. http://living-future.org/cascadia/buildsmall

I wanted to see if they had anything that we need to know about in our cruising cats. I especially was interested to attend

“Biggie Smalls: The Notorious Tiny House
Micro Houses are structures that are often smaller than 200 square feet and have captured the attention of mainstream media and the hearts of thousands of Americans. They may be portable or fixed-in-place and may stand-alone or may be tethered to a “normal” house for utilities. These wee buildings are used as backyard studios, extra bedrooms, guest suites or full-time residences. Tiny House advocates explain that these small simple structures provide a flexible, affordable, reasonable (albeit small) solution for residential use, urban infill, and pocket communities. Our panelists will present information from their experience designing, building, and living in micro-houses with a focus on the unique benefits and challenges of taking small to the extreme.

Dee Williams, Portland Alternative Dwellings (Portland)
Lina Menard, This is the Little Life (Portland)
Derin Williams, UrbaNest NW (Portland)”

 As far as I can tell, so far, they have nothing to show us boatbuilders. They are still doing stick frame and are way down on the technology continuum. I felt like a smarmy salesman trying to explain why a sandwich panel is better than studs and waferboard.

The one take-away was, in a small house, they have an artful bookshelf.  In a tiny house, its a Kindle.

I did get to meet boatbuilders and sailors David Smith and Mike Lang.

3mm or 4mm plywood is pretty easy to find. It takes more work to find even thinner plywood. Especially with the little boats, it is sometimes a better result to do CM with thin plywood, instead of stressforming 3mm or 4 mm thick plywood.  Its not cheap though.  Thanks to Al, building my 20′ tri.

The 2mm ply is from the following link:
http://www.worldpanel.com/products.asp?cat=8&pg=2
The 1.5mm from the this one:
http://www.boulterplywood.com/

I see that Palmer Johnson has a new trimaran mega-yacht. It is 48 meters long. The 1% must be doing very well; it’s all carbon fiber. The design looks very post modern multihull: like Mike Schacht work, to the third power. The amas are just vestiges though; they could not support anything. However, as the guys from NAVSEA once reminded me, those amas could diffuse the thermal signature, protecting it from heat seeking missiles.  It really is just a typical portly mega-yacht, albeit in carbon, with amas pasted on.

http://www.boatinternational.com/yacht-features/palmer-johnson-super-sport-48m/

OK. In our dreams; but the late Oracle looks fearsome. Imagine that bearing down at you.

I stumbled onto Techshop in my machine design magazine. http://www.techshop.ws/
From what I can tell, for $100 per month you can have access to a shop full of high tech tools including CADD and CNC cutting machines. That is no more than I paid for a drafty storage space. Only in a few cities yet, but surely will be in more soon. Cut out boat parts with a CNC cutter?

Flying back from IBEX I fired up the little notebook computer for the first time since travelling overseas in the Spring. I realized that I wrote a lot of articles back then. As soon as I catch up on everybody’s jobs, I will add graphics and publish. Short list of what I found.  Plywood/Composites Fusion in Boatbuilding. (lecture I gave at SCCC Boatbuilding school)  5th Generation Rotating Mast Hounds.  Cylinder Moulding in Composites. Finite Element Study of a Rotating Mast with No Shear Web
Soon as I get people’s jobs out.

The rainy season in Seattle started today. I ended my sprint against it with my Lunar Lander project. http://www.themarsoutpost.com/ I did a test assembly to see how all the parts fit and looked. In the sp

ring they will be carried 200 km east to the river where they will be epoxied together.
I had to get all the epoxy work done before the rain started as the parts got so big so fast that they no long fit in the shop.
Sarah the cat supervised every step of the assembly.

People often ask me whatever happened to the catamaran that Jack Kobayashi started? It spent the last 25 years sitting at Gils in Costa Mesa, CA. It began as a KHSD 53 and evolved after that. In fact it was the first set of construction drawings tha

t I ever did completely on CADD. It was a radical idea back then. Vendors had zero equipment files available. They had to be created in-house. I think that was ’87 or ’88. Courage Winter owns it now and is aiming to launch soon. I have been helping with the redo.

I just finished IBEX 2012 in Louisville. “Lu vull”, try it again, slower. It is always good to get updated on what the industry is doing. My unscientific guess is that there was about 1/3 the vendor display area that there was the last time I went, i

n Miami in ’09?. A couple of items that I actually wanted to buy this year were no longer there; plastic sinks from SSI Custom Plastics. One word, dot com, on the web. Lots of cool stuff but I’d have to order 20 sinks to make it worth it to them. And the inexpensive plastic solar powered vents; gone.
LED lights were ubiquitous. I liked that as I’m drawn to bright shiny things.
In the multihulls, foils were all the rage.
Again, was good to see what everybody else was up to and to catch up with friends and associates. David Gerr tells me the new prop book comes out next year. Nigel Irens told me he no longer does race-boats. All his work now is high end yachts, especially in Dubai. Nice. Ted Pike has his eyes on a certain KHSD 31 in Port Townsend. I got to talk story with Eric Sponberg several times. John Marples remarked that I was fat now.
And, drumroll.
I got to tell Dick Newick that, in my opinion, he created a new visual paradigm for multihulls, totally by himself. He was agreeable, but I’m not sure he knew who I was.