Friday Afternoon Construction?

I have noticed a couple errors or omissions on my boat. Building a boat is a complicated business with many things that could go wrong, or be overlooked. Here are a few of my "Friday Afternoon" findings." What other oddities have people found in their boats construction?

1. The lids to all the lockers have very sloppy gelcoat lines between the tan non-skid and the white gelcoat. The technician was either a rank apprentice, or had been hitting the bottle!



2. Gelcoat at the bow toerail area was laid on so thick that its splitting. Also two colors of gelcoat were used in this area and along the toe rail. Seems weird. An Oops?


3. Missing nut and washer from one of the inboard jib tracks. Easy to miss. Makes me wonder how many others are missing that I can't reach.


4. Missing plywood core on port midships stanchion (the most important one!), which lead to extensive moisture transfer through grooves in the balsa core and now needs a recore. This one is kind of a bummer...

Well, there are a lot of places where screws were sunk directly into wood with no washer and almost penetrated what they're supposed to hold on. Also the wood handrails are held on with 6-inch carriage bolts that just chew their way into the wood if you try to turn them. Not sure whether these are "errors," or they just never considered that anybody would ever try to remove them. Some of the stanchion screws were sunk at crazy angles - some of them go through the deck core and some don't. Deep in the lockers there are some bits of glass fiber that stick out from the hull, or the edge of a piece isn't firmly bonded to the layup below. Some of the cabinets were shimmed to fit with folded pieces of cigarette packs.

Sometimes I look at the number of hulls produced in the early 70's and think that the pace of work must have been pretty darned frenetic.

And by the mid-80s, remarkably inefficient by current standards. My boat is a vast challenge of joinery, all hand-fitted and finished, such that I don't know how they ever expected to make a profit. 1984 was not as I remember it (it seems yesterday) an era of cheap labor, or of abundant old-world skills. Yet the sawdust left by my boat would fill a dump truck.

I am impressed by the longevity of its parts, though many or most have now been replaced. Makes you reflect that a roof on a house may need replacement after 40 years, that a washer-dryer now fails in ten, that a swimming pool needs resurfacing two or three times in that period, that AC never goes a decade without issues, and our daily lives are burdened with the entropy of every appliance around us.

Yet a good sailboat, sitting in salt water all year, irregularly exercised, abides even in the face of neglect, and can be restored by a single fellow if the spirit moves at the expense of his time and inclination. You can't say that about a house. It is possible of course to rent the gear to refinish all your own hardware floors, but when I faced it last year, I picked up a telephone, not a floor sander.

In the case of Ericson, the few glitches aside, we profit from their unprofitability.

Yeah, core repairs under the stanchions are a pain. I have about four of them to do. One was up near the bow, and the water that leaked in from there would run along the outer rim of FRP (where there was a void between the balsa and FRP) to exit from the stanchion fasteners above the galley.

Christian Williams said:

washer-dryer now fails in ten

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Ten? I think you have done well!

My parents have a chest freezer in their garage that has been continuously running (minus power outages) since 1972. Not a single bit of maintenance. Humankind knows how to make things that last, we just choose not to these days. Yeah, you can’t stay in business if your stuff never fails. Wouldn’t it be nice though…

I’m glad Ericson built these things mostly right, despite a little Friday afternoon funkiness.

Christian Williams said:

...our daily lives are burdened with the entropy of every appliance around us.

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I'm gonna save this... You're too good of a writer Christian... =)

This is what I found after pulling out my leaking fixed port on the port side of the boat. I stead of a graceful curve that would parallel the one on the window frame I found this jagged and drunken cut that almost didn’t work and no, surprisingly this was not the source of the leak.

Bolo, that wood butchery is brutal. I recently rebedded most of my port lights, and the range of tolerance in the opening versus the port light was striking. One was "just right", but most of them gave me concerns about having adequate overlap of outer flange with hull.

Great illustration of "Friday Afternoon." They're not all that bad, but mine were certainly cut with casual attention to neatness.

And the thing is, the cuts are easy to make neatly, freehand, with a jigsaw. Bob's seem cut with a Sawzall.

But It doesn't really matter, and Ericson clearly wanted the frames to have plenty of float.