[Rhodes22-list] educational rebuttal

Melvyn Rothbard melrothbard at yahoo.com
Mon May 6 09:54:42 EDT 2013


Stan:
Great article.  I can attest that losing the jib forestay will not bring down the mast.  I have had 19 great years sailing two different Rhodes.  This past weekend, the person I had hired to paint the bottom and launch me just marveled that he had never quite seen a boat with the lines of the Rhodes.  

Take care.

Mel 

Melvyn H. Rothbard
Attorney at Law
Suite 3C
23 South 23rd Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
215 901 2258
Fax: 215 656 0993
melrothbard at yahoo.com


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--- On Mon, 5/6/13, Stan Spitzer <stan at rhodes22.com> wrote:

> From: Stan Spitzer <stan at rhodes22.com>
> Subject: Re: [Rhodes22-list] educational rebuttal
> To: "Rhodes Net" <bobandkathyr22 at bellsouth.net>, "The Rhodes 22 Email List" <rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org>, "stan spitzer" <stan at rhodes22.com>
> Date: Monday, May 6, 2013, 9:31 AM
> 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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