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.

some more pictures of Queimarala, a KHSD 42 world cruising catamaran.
http://www.thecoastalpassage.com.au/multihullqueimarla.html
I helped build the hulls to this boat back in the 80s. I flew around the world building people’s CM hulls back in those days, when CM was new.

If I remember correctly, they sailed her almost around the world and turned back before crossing the strings. It looks like a serious ocean boat to me.

saw a note from Simmo, “DALLORSO CUP 2012: Muffolo speed steady 16 knots after gennaker hoist..with frequents nose divings…shame the videocamera battery didn’t last until the upwind run at 13 knots with flying mainhull that caused frequent yaws ‘ca

use of rudderblade wasn’t in the water anymore…it’s been a superfun experience..and even if we had a 15 minutes handicap at start we almost beat a 67 footer carbon monohull!!! yo MUFFOLO!!!
Multi class result: made first of 3,second one was a corsair dash 750 that arrived 39 minutes later, and the third (dragonfly 800) arrived only 4 hours and half later considering that he broke the mainsail and the gennaker arriving then only by jib!!! BIG UP FOR MIMMO!!”

Its going to kind of be triage here for a few weeks. I have about a week of epoxyable weather to fabricate the Lunar Lander parts. They all become so big so fast that they are all outdoors. I know I tell builders not to do that, but there it is.
Fir

st week of October I will be at IBEX catching up with builders and vendors. About mid month the curtain of cold rain hits and stays until April. So I will be mixing epoxy as much as I can until then. When the rains hit I can finish everbody’s design projects.