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Thread: New Boat 4 Sled

  1. #2941
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    Sep 2007
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    Now, THAT is cool.
    1968 Selmer Series 9 B-flat and A clarinets
    1962 Buesher "Aristocrat" tenor saxophone
    Piper One Design 24, Hull #35; "Alpha"

  2. #2942
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    Last year I took the car to our local mechanic for some work there was a very nice Metropolitan sitting inn the garage. Our mechanic is sort of an older gear head and works on old(er) cars, so there's often a nice ride sitting there, but it's usually a muscle car or rod. I walked around the Nash and remembered my college days. I didn't have a car and Lewis & Clark was a few miles uphill from downtown Portland. Another student had a Metropolitan down the hall, so he'd pack up the car with 5, yes 5 or sometimes 6, guys (counting him) and we'd go off partying. And it snowed during the winter. Heavy snow. And Kim didn't have chains. So quite a few times going back up Palatine Hill to the dorm 2 of us would get out, hang onto the "Continental" tire cover plant our feet on the tiny bumper to provide traction. We survived, but looking back I'm not sure how. I won't even begin about on riding double on the Vespa another dorm rat had. Makes singlehanded sailing sound almost sane.

  3. #2943
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    Christmas at Sea Robert Lewis Stevenson

    The sheets were frozen hard, and they cut the naked hand;
    The decks were like a slide, where a seaman scarce could stand;
    The wind was a nor'wester, blowing squally off the sea;
    And cliffs and spouting breakers were the only things a-lee.

    They heard the surf a-roaring before the break of day;
    But 'twas only with the peep of light we saw how ill we lay.
    We tumbled every hand on deck instanter, with a shout,
    And we gave her the maintops'l, and stood by to go about.

    All day we tacked and tacked between the South Head and the North;
    All day we hauled the frozen sheets, and got no further forth;
    All day as cold as charity, in bitter pain and dread,
    For very life and nature we tacked from head to head.

    We gave the South a wider berth, for there the tide race roared;
    But every tack we made we brought the North Head close aboard:
    So's we saw the cliffs and houses, and the breakers running high,
    And the coastguard in his garden, with his glass against his eye.

    The frost was on the village roofs as white as ocean foam;
    The good red fires were burning bright in every 'long-shore home;
    The windows sparkled clear, and the chimneys volleyed out;
    And I vow we sniffed the victuals as the vessel went about.

    The bells upon the church were rung with a mighty jovial cheer;
    For it's just that I should tell you how (of all days in the year)
    This day of our adversity was blessèd Christmas morn,
    And the house above the coastguard's was the house where I was born.

    O well I saw the pleasant room, the pleasant faces there,
    My mother's silver spectacles, my father's silver hair;
    And well I saw the firelight, like a flight of homely elves,
    Go dancing round the china plates that stand upon the shelves.

    And well I knew the talk they had, the talk that was of me,
    Of the shadow on the household and the son that went to sea;
    And O the wicked fool I seemed, in every kind of way,
    To be here and hauling frozen ropes on blessèd Christmas Day.

    They lit the high sea-light, and the dark began to fall.
    'All hands to loose top gallant sails,' I heard the captain call.
    'By the Lord, she'll never stand it,' our first mate, Jackson, cried.
    … 'It's the one way or the other, Mr. Jackson,' he replied.

    She staggered to her bearings, but the sails were new and good,
    And the ship smelt up to windward just as though she understood.
    As the winter's day was ending, in the entry of the night,
    We cleared the weary headland, and passed below the light.

    And they heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me,
    As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea;
    But all that I could think of, in the darkness and the cold,
    Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.

    Merry Christmas All.
    Last edited by sleddog; 12-24-2018 at 09:06 AM.

  4. #2944
    Join Date
    Feb 2015
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    49

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    Hi, very cute car! By the way, only the early cars had the common A 40 Devon engine. The Metropolitans after 1955 used the extremely common Austin B series engine. This is good news, since parts are very easy to obtain. The gas mileage for all versions is reported to be pretty good, about 30 mpg. Over the years, the 0-60 times decreased from 30 to 22s, and the top speed increased to 75 mph. If this should not be enough, the B series engine was widely used in sportier cars such as the MG A and MG B, and it would be pretty easy to get quite a bit more horsepower by just swapping carburetors. Or swap in a later B-series engine with an MGB carburetor or a Rover V8 and the sky is the limit....(quite literally, the suspension is one of the weaker parts of the car). Cheers Jan

  5. #2945
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    Sep 2007
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    The aforementioned Nash Metropolitan enroute, photographed on Southbound I-5 today. Should arrive under the tree tomorrow. Thanks for the history lessons! Your comments have been passed to the new owner, who is excited to say the least. This little beauty will make an appearance at RYC at some point in the future. I'll be sure to let you know when.

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    Last edited by sleddog; 12-24-2018 at 07:58 PM.

  6. #2946
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    The crew of DAZZLER, Tom and Sue, have checked in from aboard the stern wheeler paddleboat AMERICAN QUEEN enroute Memphis to NOLA. AMERICAN QUEEN is 420' x 89' and carries up to 400 passengers in "elegant casual" accommodations.

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    For some obscure reason, omni-talented Sue is licensed to play the shipboard calliope and has been doing so for 300 passengers. Swing dancing anyone? Tom is entertained observing the pilot house being lowered on scissors jacks so it's flush and just clears under bridges using the "baton rouge" measuring pole.. As well, the smokestacks are on hinges and fold down as needed. As they are navigating downstream in 5-6 knots of favorable current, to pass under bridges, the AMERICAN QUEEN is turned 180 and passes under bridges stern first powering up current to allow increased maneuverability.

    The Mississippi is currently at flood stage, so tying up, known as "choking the stump" is challenging, as the shoreside "stumps" (bitts and cleats) are sometimes underwater. But the captain knows his "duckwater" (back eddies) and so far there has been no mishaps of note except for a crushed port side railing. Quack, quack.

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    Last edited by sleddog; 01-01-2019 at 12:26 PM.

  7. #2947
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    8 years, and 3,500 miles east of where Abby Sunderland abandoned her dismasted Class 40 WILD EYES. the overturned hull, sans keel and rudder, has been found drifting near Kangaroo Island, South Australia. Come and get it.

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    Last edited by sleddog; 01-02-2019 at 08:11 PM.

  8. #2948
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    In late 2016, American diplomats living in Cuba began hearing a strange noise in their homes. It was high-pitched, deafening, and persistent—and no one could work out where it was coming from.

    In the following years, the mystery ballooned into an international incident. Many of the diplomats experienced dizziness, insomnia, hearing loss, and other troubling symptoms. A team from the University of Pennsylvania examined 21 affected people and concluded that they had “sustained injury to widespread brain networks.” Donald Trump, without evidence, accused Cuba of being responsible. Various parties argued that the strange noise was the result of a sonic weapon, a microwave attack, or malfunctioning eavesdropping equipment.

    But when the biologist Alexander Stubbs heard a recording, he heard not mechanical bugs, but biological ones. He realized that the noise sounded like the insects he used to hear while doing fieldwork in the Caribbean.

    Together with Fernando Montealegre-Z, an expert on entomological acoustics, Stubbs scoured an online database of insect recordings. As first reported by Carl Zimmer in The New York Times, they found that one species of cricket - the Indies short-tailed cricket—makes a call that’s indistinguishable from the enigmatic Cuban recording.

    https://entnemdept.ifas.ufl.edu/walker/buzz/492a.htm

    After analyzing similar recordings, the Cuban government also pointed its finger at crickets. But they blamed the wrong species—one whose song sounds very different, even to untrained ears. By contrast, the song of the Indies short-tailed cricket matches the Cuban noise in several telltale ways. Both are loudest at a frequency of 7 kilohertz, roughly an octave beyond the highest notes on a piano. Both consist of pulses that repeat 180 times a second. In both, each pulse consists of 30 oscillations, which become slightly lower in pitch as they die away.

    Only one thing didn’t match: The pulses in the recording were more erratic and variable than those of most insects. But that, Stubbs thinks, is because the cricket’s call was probably echoing off the surfaces of an indoor space, creating several sound streams that interfered with one another. When he played and recorded the cricket’s call indoors, the result matched the Cuban noise even more closely.

    Cricket behavior could also help explain another mysterious detail of the Cuban incidents: Several diplomats claimed that the sound abruptly stopped when they entered a room or moved around. That’s “consistent with an insect stopping a call when threatened,” Stubbs and Montealegre-Z write.

    Of course, the diplomats could have been attacked in some other way. Or their symptoms might be the result of a mass psychosomatic illness. Diplomats in China also reported mysterious sounds and symptoms, still unexplained. But for now it seems that the noise at the heart of the Cuban incidents probably has a benign origin.

    Don't tell Homeland Security. The cricket story reminds me of a very similar saga: the Sausalito Houseboat hum. As some will remember, back in the 1980s, liveaboards were kept awake by a loud, rumbling hum, a drumming which reverberated through the walls of their expensive houseboats. Some thought it was effluent being pumped from a sewage pipe. Others blamed a cable recently laid by an electric company. Yet others suspected Russian submarines.

    But John McCosker, from the California Academy of Sciences, eventually showed that the hum was the love song of the male plainfin midshipman—a type of toadfish. These fish attract females by vibrating their swim bladder, the same organ that keeps them afloat, to produce an extremely loud noise that sounds more like a foghorn than a fish. When many males sing en masse, the ruckus can be heard on land, in Sausalito, Seattle, Southampton, and everywhere else that toadfish are found.

    https://dosits.org/galleries/audio-g...in-midshipman/

    As a kid, sailing with the family to Catalina, I remember countless nights falling asleep to multitudinous clicking noises outside the hull of our L-36. Only later did we learn those crackling pops were made by the oversize claws of microscopic snapping shrimp.

    I'm sure you've heard unexplained noises aboard. And not just from instrumentation cables drumming against the inside of the mast when at anchor. For Rob and friends, here's the wing fart of the Tiger Beetle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVf_MjcAeSo
    Last edited by sleddog; 01-08-2019 at 02:56 PM.

  9. #2949
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    Possibly explains the noises but not the symptoms.

  10. #2950
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    Quote Originally Posted by The Smokester View Post
    Possibly explains the noises but not the symptoms.
    https://entnemdept.ifas.ufl.edu/walker/buzz/492a.htm

    Listening to this buzz x 100 for hours would certainly give me symptoms of something .....

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