[Rhodes22-list] educational rebuttal

[Stan Spitzer]

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