[Rhodes22-list] educational rebuttal

[marlangreen at gmail.com]

Is there a Rhodes 22 Hull #1? That is, does the first Rhodes 22 ever built
by General Boats Int'l still exist?

Anyone know where it is?

Is it kept in Stan's back yard and has it been bronzed?

Just a thought that passed through my empty head as I was reading Stan's
e-mail.

Marlan


On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 1:37 PM, Graham Stewart <gstewart8 at cogeco.ca> wrote:

> 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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