[Rhodes22-list] educational rebuttal

[Graham Stewart]

Stan:

This is very interesting and helpful. It is a completely novel and amazing
situation to have a person who has been dedicated to building one particular
boat from its conception over 40 years ago. Yes, you should write that book.

Graham 


-----Original Message-----
From: rhodes22-list-bounces at rhodes22.org
[mailto:rhodes22-list-bounces at rhodes22.org] On Behalf Of Stan Spitzer
Sent: May-06-13 9:31 AM
To: Rhodes Net; The Rhodes 22 Email List; stan spitzer
Subject: Re: [Rhodes22-list] educational rebuttal

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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