[Rhodes22-list] educational rebuttal

Mon May 6 13:37:16 EDT 2013

Stan,

I always learn something new from you.  Now I know how to eliminate those
annoying low hanging limbs by the launch ramp.

Rick

On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 12:56 PM, <R22RumRunner at aol.com> wrote:

> Awesome Stan. Glad to see you haven't lost your sense of humor and are
> still willing to educate the masses.
>
> Rummy
>
>
> In a message dated 5/6/2013 9:31:42 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
> stan at rhodes22.com writes:
>
> Dear  Rhodies and Rhodes Prospects:
>
>
> Recovery does allow one some free  time so I would like to say a word for
> the Rhodes.
> (It also allows some  time for writing - like what you would like
> engraved in stone.  I had  always liked "I told them I was sick" but that
> has been taken so am toying  with "after an 87 year battle with natural
> causes".)
>
> When you are  young you tend to know the other guy knows more than you.
> When you  get real old, you know nobody knows more than you - at least
> Rhodes and  politically, speaking.  I won't take the List's time
> politically  since I am always writing that book and never getting much
> further than  the changing of titles, the latest being, "MINORITY OF
> FOOLS,  the  triggering of the Coming Boom" - stan spitzer's first book
> in 87  years.
>
> The Rhodes is a different story.  I did not come to bury  the Rhodes, as
> so many on the List have been doing.  I have come to  see that its legacy
> outlives all who live to sail - and the rest of us who  sail to live.
>
> In the beginning our contribution was creative design,  not the
> breaking-in of new construction techniques.  Every builder  used wood for
> the cores, rivets for the shoe box seams and thin glass for  the new
> market of the hoped for masses.  So we did too.
>
> All we  had was a shared advertising art studio 2nd floor office on 46th
> street,  so we spent the nineteen seventies at the pros from Nova Scotia
> to  Wichita, watching them build their boats - and ours.
>
> In those days,  when cores were made with balsa and each square patiently
> tapped to try  and insure bonding, or with strips of fir or ply, we
> squirmed  instinctively.  But we were only in our forties. Nevertheless
> we  stared making up our own core packages to bring to the contractor:
> Shaped  ply panels that we slotted and coated with resin.  Somewhat
> better  since many of the old Rhodes we later bought back, still had
> solid  decks.  Some did not.   Today, Rhodes decks have no wood.   Cores
> are plastic.  Thickness is overkill.  We tell show lookers  to skip tire
> kicking and jump on our decks instead; then watch competitors
> expressions when lookers begin jumping up and down on their  decks.
>
> In those days of simplified pricing, it was by the pound - glass  and
> resin used.  The lighter the boat the more competitive, price  wise. The
> Ventures came along and made this building, an art form.   In water it
> did not seem to matter - on land the art form had its weak  points,
> particularly on trailers.  In my fifties standing in the  lazaret,
> feeling the flexing hull bottom underfoot, was unnerving. Molding  the
> Rhodes keel as an integrated part of the hull itself, made the Rhodes
> mid-ship bottom, naturally stiff, whereas competitive boats bolted on
> their keels.  Few boats had flotation. Those that did accomplished it
> with chunks of bought foam planks, as we ourselves did - in our early
> days; until it dawned on us to marry the two by molding the foam to fit
> the hull, then glass it in to stiffen the cockpit and bow sections of
> the boat bottom.  It also dawned on us that a modest redesign of the
> floor unit stringers and their glassing in, added more bottom
> stiffness.  By the time we moved the making of the hulls to our own
> shop, we had matured enough to have given up on the price wars.  We
> started to lay up the port side hull glass so it continued on across the
> bottom, and the starboard side glass lay up so it too continued on
> across the bottom.   With the hull sides extraordinarily stiff  from the
> Rhodes unusual compound curved flared hull shape, now its bottom  was
> extraordinarily stiff from being twice the thickness of the sides. The
> hulls we build today in our own facility are so extraordinarily stiff
> that we lift the boats by their bow eye and transom eyes and boat shape
> shows no deflection.  This amazing difference from our early boats  /is/
> probably overkill because I do not know of any other builder who  moves
> their boats around supported at only its two extremes.
>
> In  those days masts in our category were mostly supported by three stays
> (maybe a forth as a backstay) and stepped on a well connected mast
> tabernacle.  With only the jib stay forward of the pivot point and  the
> most likely to fail; bringing the mast down - and part of the cabin  top
> up, damage to boat and crew could be noteworthy. Reading, we learned
> that masts with this kind of elementary rigging, were subject to
> "pumping" symptoms.  Observing, we noted the vaccination for mast
> pumping on larger sailboats was lower shrouds, fore and aft of the mast
> pivot point.   Extremists from the start, we went from 3 to 9  stays, and
> a screwed-on "break-away" mast step. The results (worth the  increase in
> costs and slight increase in rigging time):   A  superior mast load
> distribution on the hull.  A breaking jib stay  (the most likely stay to
> fail on a sailboat) does not bring down the  mast.  The evolution of the
> Rhodes mast hoist system.  The  wiping out of mast pumping.  The built-in
> vertical life line effects  from multiple spaced out shrouds.  The safety
> of redundancy. The  evolution of the Rhodes unique traveler system.  And
> even if the sore  loser of the race you just won, pulls all 9 stay pins,
> your deck top does  not feel the pain.   Remember, the 4 additional lower
> shrouds  are there to take the pumping action out of your mast (and
> support it in  an emergency if ever an upper shroud failure).  However,
> to those  creative early-boat owners who over-tighten or somehow manage
> to sail into  obstacles to loosen or even pull out these innocent 4 extra
> chain plates,  take comfort in knowing that in the latest Rhodes they are
> also glassed  into the deck to make their damaging a bit more difficult.
> For those  who, at sometime or another, have to see what happens when
> sailing under a  low bridge or trailing with the mast up or trying to
> take down an  overhanging tree branch the easy way, and are annoyed by
> the results,  sorry, we have supported your boat's mast to the best of
> our abilities -  so far.
>
> In those days most decks and hulls were joined with  rivets.  Fast, easy,
> not so strong because they were aluminum.   They did not allow for a
> controlled drawing in (spacing between deck and  hull) and their shaft
> (steel) sometimes broke, remaining inside the  compressed rivet,
> eventually leaving dripping rust stains.  The  alternate, glassing deck
> to hull, took its toll on workers and hence  builders. Nuts on bolts, too
> difficult.  SS screws through the deck  and threading into the hull,
> actually turns out to be the best way to go.  Stainless is strong and
> forever and allows spacing control. General Boats  benefits from the best
> quality control possible - our owners.   Because we do not sell through
> dealers we are able to cup our ears.   If no screams, we know /that/ idea
> is working.  If we are mistaken we  get first hand field reports and we
> can turn on a smaller dime than the  big guys. New Rhodes decks to hulls
> are bolted at the transom corners'  chain plates and main upper shroud
> chain plates and screwed together  in-between.  Winches, cleats, tracks,
> that carry shear forces, are  installed with machine screws threaded into
> our thick glass layup.   Does that work?  You have told us it does.  Not
> once in all our  years have we lost a single deck or any hardware so
> attached.    We rest our shear load case.    Deck/hull seam leakage?  The
> boat is not intended to be sailed with the rail under water, but that is
> inevitable.   And here we have goofed.  We just assumed  everyone knew
> how to use a caulking gun and observed many of our earlier  workers did
> not.  For those in the latter class we point out that you  advance with
> the gun in front of you forcing the sealant up into the  cavity as you
> progress, NOT with gun moving away from its chore so it is  pulling on
> the sealant.
>
>
> The moral of all this is the same as in  the closing scene of the movie
> classic "Some Like It Hot" where Joe E.  Brown, sitting in the back seat
> of a motor boat, puts his arm around Jack  Lemon who, in a dress, is
> wearing a blond wig and Lemon pulls off his wig  in his final frustrated
> attempt to prove he is not a woman, to which Brown  persists his
> advances, gleefully delivering the movie's last line,  "Nobody's perfect".
>
> Except, of course, a recent  Rhodes.
>
>
> ss
>
>
>
>
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