Topic

The only good use of wood is shipping pallets, packing dunnage, Rolls-Royce and Jaguar dashboard veneers!
It’s also the best material for making trees out of.
Damned stuff is never straight, even if it is relatively straight it won’t stay that way, and until CIG makes woodcraft welding rods it will always be a bastard of a thing to stick together!

I use a fine chipboardian piece for doing my horological duties on……

Can I take issue with your wooden comments Cobber? One of the village cottages has recently been renovated (gentrified) & all the roof timbers were replaced, the skeletal remains were chainsawn & thrown in a waiting skip. They were soon out & are keeping my wife & I warm this winter as they did last. I have seen no straighter or finer red deal than this; sadly it has been wracked by the march of time, wood boring insects & the chainsaw.
And as to the joining of wood you only need to look at the WW2 aeroplane the DeHavilland Mosquito, the wooden wonder, which was originally stuck together with casein glue, the basis of which is milk protein. If you reflect on how difficult it is to get Weetabix off a dish; it’s stuck on with what is basically casein. Later Mosquito’s used Aerolite or Aerodux.

... And the strength to weight ratio is incredible. My 80 plus kilos could be carried to ten thousand feet in ten minutes on just forty horsepower in a wooden framed light aircraft weighting 160 KG fully fuelled. Being modern, it was glued together with epoxy and despite repeated attempts to reduce it to matchwood, The worst I could manage was to take the landing gear off. Being made of tree, it was cheaply repaired. Here it is following a forced landing in less than ideal terrain.

The best lump of wood I’ve ever had was a 26’ clinker hulled boat made of Huon pine, it was built in 1870 as a rowboat and used as a ferry to cross the Mersey River in Tasmania.
True to form I stuffed a 40 hp 4cyl diesel in to it and used it as a work boat. That’s about 4 x more power than it would need to get to hull speed.
And I must confess to using a pair of red gum railway sleepers as engine bearers, though they were braced with fabricated steel beams.
The choice of engine was because it’s what I had laying about, it had been a spare auxiliary motor out of a 50’ scallop and cray boat we had,…. Come to think of it it was timber too, and it too was over powered with a bloody great Detroit 871 diesel, it would win the annual fishing fleet trawler race every time.

Jeez did it go… you could get it to almost plane, we even pulled a water skier up just to prove it could be done!
It made a great work boat as with it’s shoal draft it could operate in very shallow water, and it’s low freeboard made it easy to work out of. But it was bloody wet, it’d rather punch through a wave than go over it.

Many a grounded cruiser got dragged back to deep water and many a broken down boat got towed back for repair and more importantly many a beer keg got delivered to beach parties in the Gippsland Lakes.

We would load the kegs on to the boat from the Ute using the jetty crane and then take them to my matés barge set up on the beach which was used as both the bar and the stage for the band!
In those days all our parties involved kegs of beer, a beast roasting on a spit and least one live band.
There was always plenty of wacky tobaccy around for those so inclined, that we didn’t have to organise, it would however seemingly appear of it’s own accord.
We were very well organised, operating with a military precision level of planning.

No wonder it went like stink, what size of prop’ did it have?
For a while I was involved a seventy foot narrowboat, iron hull, elm bottom, it had a twin cylinder National heavy oil engine with less than half your boat’s horsepower & that didn’t think about stopping until cavitation occurred.
The prop’ was the best part of three foot in diameter but as soon as air was drawn in & there was nothing for it to bite on it was dead in the water.

The light aeroplane had several propellers in my tenure but by far the best was a Newton 60x42" which would drag the machine along at eighty knots throttled back. Flat out, it would make 100 MPH straight and level easily which was the official Vne (Velocity never exceed). A good prop makes a huge difference; a great one makes an aeroplane fantastic to fly.
These days though, I get my fun in two dimensions.

Airportable wrote:

Can I take issue with your wooden comments Cobber? One of the village cottages has recently been renovated (gentrified) & all the roof timbers were replaced, the skeletal remains were chainsawn & thrown in a waiting skip. They were soon out & are keeping my wife & I warm this winter as they did last. I have seen no straighter or finer red deal than this; sadly it has been wracked by the march of time, wood boring insects & the chainsaw.
And as to the joining of wood you only need to look at the WW2 aeroplane the DeHavilland Mosquito, the wooden wonder, which was originally stuck together with casein glue, the basis of which is milk protein. If you reflect on how difficult it is to get Weetabix off a dish; it’s stuck on with what is basically casein. Later Mosquito’s used Aerolite or Aerodux.

My dear departed Uncle flew Spitfires and Mosquitos in WW2 , he once told me that while he was in Africa the Mosquitos frequently came apart in the heat of the sun , as the glue would melt .

That’s interesting Aerolite is a urea formaldehyde adhesive & whenever it’s described it is noted as water & heat resistant although susceptible to biodegradation.

I now wish I’d continue with flying lessons. I flew out of Blackpool & was as keen as mustard at the start however as the hours mounted I found greater pleasure looking out of the cockpit & it’s an expensive hobby to go aerial site seeing.

Airportable wrote:

No wonder it went like stink, what size of prop’ did it have?

The whole thing was cobbled up outta stuff that was laying about, it was a bit of a floating junk yard.
I don’t recall the details of 30 odd years ago but the gearbox was a Coventry out of an ancient lifeboat it was an island type design, meaning it was mounted separately from the engine.
Originally as fitted to the lifeboat it was powered by a bloody great crank handle running the length of the boat with all the survivors winding it by hand! Thing thing that got me was why they thought they needed a gearbox with forward neutral and reverse….. if you needed to idle, just stop turning the crank and to go backwards just wind the other way. The whole concept was totally mad!
This allowed me to place the weight of the engine a bit further forward to held keep the bow down under full power. Which it needed as that arse would dig in deep, under full power and made a huge bow wave and a seriously churned wake.
Mind you it never had any cavitation problems.
The cooling was seawater pushed though the system by a Jabsco impeller pump, the rubber engine mounts were 4 Holden gear box mounts, these things were as common as arseholes ( everyone had one ) they were normally used in suspension with one holding the weight of the back half of the engine and gearbox.
I flipped them over and used them in compression, and with 4 of ‘em, more than strong enough for the jod.
The fuel tank came from an old Fiat 850 Sport. A bit small but adequate for what I used it for.
The prop was @ 2’ at a guess it had a fair amount of pitch, I got that from an old bloke who had the ability just look at a boat / engine combination and guess the optimal size and pitch of the “fan” required….. at no time did this bloke resort to fancy mathematical equations….he probably had trouble counting to 20 without tacking his shoes and socks off and would then need to take his pants off to get to 21!

I would like to thank all our readers for dropping in on the Practical Boat Owner pages.
On these pages you will find contributions from people who are easily distracted by almost anything & whose minds & skills cover a wide range of disciplines.
Topics will cover almost anything nautical, aerial or terrestrial, with the exception of football. Those who are interested in men sweating there cods off in a country where there cods would normally be removed using a blunt scimitar in the Catarrhal capital for doing what footballers do regularly might look elsewhere.
This latest article is from one of our antipodean contributor, Cobber (not his real name) & illustrates how inventive our colonial friends can be, even when starved of the home nations supply chain.
He demonstrates admirably how our castoffs can be cajoled into a craft of surprising performance. This shows perfectly how these primitive souls, equipped with rudimentary tools can forge equipment of astonishing sophistication. Some item exhibit a primitive beauty rarely seen in our far away colonies
Cobber writes with a gimlet eyed caustic wit which has entertained many & embarrassment to a few. I would like to SAY thank you but I doubt he would be able to hear due to the banging, thumping, shouting of profanities & the racket of the ubiquitous kookaburra.
You are a national treasure, fortunately you are also on the other side of the world.

Well, in a land of snakes, poisonous spiders and weak beer, it don't take much to be a national treasure! Joking apart, we have come a long way from the topic and I, for one, have enjoyed the journey.