where assumptions get you

My old Hobart welder--1941 with a four cylinder Wisconsin engine--wasn't working this Spring. She was fine in the fall, but her winter nap must have taken something out of here because, while the engine fired right up, the welder gave out not a single amp of juice.

It's hard to work on this old machine because I have no information on it and no schematic to show me around. Requests on websites with forums of tinkerers and even a call out to the manufacturer provided nothing of assistance. But I wake up one morning to find an email from Canada where someone on one of the sites not only sent me a scan of old documents, he also kept looking around for other information, which is a tall order considering we're talking about a machine 50 years old that even the manufacturer has no records for.

All I needed to do was flash the exciter windings and that would re-magnetize the iron core and then the welder would crank up plenty of voltage. I'll spare you the tech details, but I kept insisting that this welder--basically a big DC generator--was self-exciting and had no separate windings. This guy kept saying that there must be an exciter and kept sending me more scans. Finally, I realized that I was wrong. Had I had my eyes open--well, really my brain open--I would have had this thing fixed right away. In reality, had it not been for someone else seeing things clearly, I'd still be staring at a welder that just makes a lot of noise but no spark.

How often do we close ourselves off from solutions or possibilities in life due to assumptions that we make and protect?

It makes all the difference

I google "sea mule" every now and then--one never knows what'll come up. I happened to get 2 good hits: one a newspaper article for the Oregonian about a Sea MUle that sank down at the John Dey dam and one for a Sea Mule for sale on a Government auction.

Pretty exciting! I called people at the Dam to connect with staff there who worked on their Sea Mule, or at least operated it, but couldn't get anywhere. You would have thought I was prying information out of the FBI. Nobody would talk. Finally after many pestering calls I caught the Head of Maintainence at his desk. "The best I can do for you is pass along your phone number to the people in the garage and, if they want to, they'll call you." Nobody ever did. The organization our tax dollars fund that was so helpful to me here? The Army Corps of Engineers.

I managed to track down the other Mule, by luck and a guess. It was at the Grand Coulee dam. Sent them an email and got a response back right away. "You betcha we got a Sea Mule. What would you like to know about it?" I ended up making friends with one of the staff, Kent Peterson, who even invited me up to see the boat in person.

Of course, I took him up on the offer and got to see the first Sea Mule other than my own. It gave me some great ideas and a shot in the arm that, yes, there is hope for my boat.

It also restored my faith in people. I'm choosing to believe that it's at least 50/50...for every dead-hearted, unhelpful stick-in-the-mud there's another person who's wide-hearted and even on the lookout for opportunities to help fellow travelers.

with a lot of help from friends

It's quite reassuring how willing complete strangers are to help me with my sea mule. Humbling, actually.

For example, I am now trying to figure out if the boat can handle the hydraulic log loader that I've got waiting to go on board. A 6,500 lb steel Prentice that can reach out 22 ft with its grapple and pull logs up and out of the lake, loading them on shore or where ever I want them.

The big question is "Will the boat tip over when I do this?" A good question to get answered before I build it. So I go to http://www.boatdesign.net/ looking for guidance. Hiring a naval architect is not something I can afford, but I was hoping that some of the pro's that hang out on this site would at least give me either a "What? You're crazy!" or a "Well, it could work if..."

Instead, I get 2 professional naval architects, one in Italy and one in Japan, who kick things around, do a bunch of figuring and what-if runs on the computer and give me the answers I need.

Now it's one thing if you are a carpenter and someone asks you if you'd lend a hand painting their fence for the afternoon. But when you're a carpenter and someone asks you if you'd like to pound some nails, well, that's kinda hard to get enthused about. These guys do this for a living and, yet, they were willing to do it for me, for free. Pretty cool.


People, most people, want to be helpful, are plain hard-wired to make the people around them better off. Perhaps love is too strong a word, but let's call it various forms of that, weaker versions of love. And as they said way back when Amor Vincit Omnia!

If you look, you can see it all around you: the wave of the driver in the car passing by, someone who let's you cut in line, hands being held, smiles made. Sure, it's easy to point to all the bad stuff, but, there is this foundation of love being made as Paul McCartney sang "The love you take is equal to the love you make."

The full back-and-forth can be viewed at http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/boat-design/putting-log-loader-barge-28481-3.html

a lot of air

I finished the sandblaster. It was lost of fun to make in that it satisfied two favorite criteria: free form and low cost.

I took a large old propane tank I got at the junk yard for 5 bucks and, after filling it with water to be safe, modified it with the torch to meet my needs. Then I rummaged around in my shop for ells, tees, valves, hoses and gauges to plumb it up into a functional sandblaster. The great thing was that all the parts I needed were right there under my shop roof. It's not the money I saved doing that, it's that it vindicates me from all the "pack rat" accusations I endure over the years! Check out the cool cart Imounted it on so that I can roll it to the work site http://seamule.blogspot.com/2009/03/de-cart-gets-its-bearings.html

Yesterday I hooked it up to my air compressor, a 100 cfm brute mounted on a trailer. I trust my welding skills, but I gotta admit that, when I powered it up for the first time, I hid behind the air compressor. Hey, 120 lbs of air pressure in an old tank just makes me a bit nervous. It held air fine, but one hose section blew, which really was my fault as I had used heater hose. I changed that over to some very stout stuff and now it works fine.

Well, to be accurate, it holds air fine. I gotta go get some sacks of sandblasting sand--I'm thinking 30 grit masonry sand--and then we'll really see how it performs.

Once I have it working well, it's time to start stripping paint and rust off the boat hull.

the boat is back

Today I got the boat hull section back down the road. It had been sitting (well, listing) on the road side since the big mishap back in November, 2008. A source of much laughter and many questions, I must admit to a general feeling of uneasiness every time I drove by it. Subtle, little nagging feelings like: "ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? LOOK WHAT YOU'VE DONE! THIS BOAT PROJECT WILL NEVER WORK!" Little stuff like that. And after trying to right it up off it's leaning position didn't work--the Mack truck just spun his wheels--I was feeling even worse about it.

That all started changing last night. I took my trusty railroad jack, the big red guy that can easily lift 15 ton, and set it between the bank and the side of the hull. Lots of cranking and positioning of blocks and reminding myself to stay safe (slipping down the bank between the boat hull and the bank could have been disastrous had the boat chose that moment to tip back off the jack) and I got it up. Couldn't quite get it to fall over all the way back to good, though.

That had to wait for this morning and my friend, Hugh. Everybody should have a friend that will, on a work day, come over first thing in the morning to help you do something that's just for you--they don't get anything out of it. They just do it for you--because you asked. Everybody should be so blessed.

We met down there at 7:15. We hooked his pickup truck to the side of the boat and he began pulling it the last little bit over. To keep it from going to far and rocking all the way over, I had a chain hoist attached to the hull and a stout ponderosa pine. That way, after it came over the top of the fall, I could lower it down to the flat bottom of the hull.

Then we hooked the Mack up with a very stout chain, 1 1/2" dia. links. Hugh got in the truck to drive, and I got behind the little parade to keep track of what was going to transpire. I was worried that the hull would fall over to one side or the other, so I lashed a 12' 6 x 8 timber to the bottom of the hull to act like an outrigger to keep things from tipping over. I hoped. If it did go over, we'd never get it back upright again with out the crane and there would not be the room in the road to get the crane up there. Well, as some one once told me "The brave don't live forever; the cautious don't live at all...."

Well, the brave thing was working. I was glad to see that Dr. Brown could pull that 20,000 lb steel box on down the road. And no tipping problems, either. Here's some video of it:

We ran into problems at the bottom. The Mack couldn't pull it. A big ol Mack dump truck with a 20 speed tranny and it couldn't do it! To be fair to the old doctor, it really wasn't his fault...there wasn't enough traction: his wheel started just tearing up the gravel road.

We backed him up and took as much running start as we dared. Nope. We backed him up and shortened the chain as much as we could, thinking that that would put more weight on the back wheels. Nope.

And there the boat sat in the middle of the road. Blocking the road.

Nothing left to do but go on up and wake up Alice, my 1965 M100b Allis Chalmers road grader. At this point, I'm feeling bad because I had told Hugh it would be a piece of cake and he'd be able to get off to his work at a reasonable morning hour. And here we were getting the grader warmed up and ready.

Eventually, we got the grader on down the road and positioned in front of the boat hull in Dr. Brown's place. I wasn't sure how the grader would pull in comparison to the Mack. Wow, incredible difference. Barely even had to work at it. Alice pulled that boat hull on down the rest of the road and I was able to swing it over and park the hull section right about exactly where it had been last fall on the fateful day when we had lifted it up and into the bed of the Mack and tried to carry it up the mountain. Here's Alice in action:

A year later and a bit smarter, I called it a morning. Off to go help Hugh and that turned out to be the best part of the whole day.

it doesn't always go like you imagine

Next step, albeit very much delayed, in the Sea Mule hull section number 4's journey is to get it back down the road. It as spent all Winter into Spring listing on the roadside halfway up my mountain after I had to dump in off my injured Mack truck.

The task now is to pull the leaning hull section back upright and then drag it down the road back to its starting point.

I asked my friend, Hugh, to come be driver while I was the "outside eyes" monitoring things. Hugh has many years in the seat of a Mack plowing snow for Okanogan Highway Department. Besides, he hasn't had the experience of helping me in my Sea Mule-often-turned dramas. Fresh blood, as it were.

I drove the truck down thru the switchbacks--three point turns all--and got the truck positioned at a right angle to the boat hull. It was listing at a bit more than a 45 degrees and I imagined that it wouldn't take much of a pull to right it. Imagined.

It required so much pull that, instead of pulling the hull upright, it just spun the back tires on the dump truck. No matter what position, no matter how hard we tried.

Funny how that goes. Something you think aughta work...doesn't. Something that looks easy...isn't. Something you think will turn out a certain way...turns out different. And half the time, at least, that's a good thing.

Next strategy: We talked over loading the Mack with gravel, say 5 yards, to get some more weight on the the back end, but that would require my digging up and loading that much rock. Instead, what I am going to do is bring down Alice, my road grader (Allis Chalmers). She has 4 powered wheels, thru the tandem chain boxes and lots of weight--26,000 lbs--to keep her footing. That should pull the boat hull back upright....

Dr. brown is back in town

Got a fish plate cut out (called such because it is supposed to be shaped like a fish with no straight lines that'll promote new frame cracks) and bolted up into place. Welding it in would have been so much easier, but those in the know say not to as it'll crack again. Bolts are the answer. Flanged frame bolts. There were a few pre-drilled holes in the frame, courtesy of Mack Co., but the rest I had to drill. Not a simple task drilling 1/2" holes thru 3/4" steel, but with a cobalt drill bit, slow drill speed and lots of squirts of oil I managed.

I was on the home stretch, with the clock calling 5:15 when the barn phone rang. My friend, Gary. I didn't really want to talk, but he needed to. So we did, a discussion about our church's stanch on accepting people to workshop who are gay or lesbian. This conversation ate up my remaining time I had before I needed to go pick up my son, Soren.

As I walked away from my almost-finished frame repair (one bolt left to drill and then put the wheels back on), I felt frustrated. The walk back up to the house fixed that. I reflected on what was interrupting me from "my work:" my friend, Gary, who would help me in any way he could by my just asking, a thoughtful conversation about how Jesus' most important message was to love each other (the greatest of these is love) and then, lastly, my five-year-old son, Soren. The truck is a thing, just a thing. Ultimately, all we got on this journey is each other. My job--no, my reward--is that.