Self-Launching Boat

Well somebody's got to do it, and this is where we're going with it... and it dropped yesterday in a device near you.

Ed. the loathsome expression 'dropped' originates from the US and was adopted in the UK now that we cannot invent anything ourselves, let alone expressions. Here DJs, politicos and media types compete to see how often it can be used in a single sentence... a medical condition I call 'dropsy' ©

London Heathrot

London's principal airport ~ where I myself was based for six happy-ish years ~ as it looked altogether earlier when we'd be up there ourselves spotting aircraft. There were ponds, flower-beds, play-areas, roof-top piers and viewing galleries. Whereas in keeping with the times, now it's a shitty shopping mall with over-priced coffee-bars prior boarding boring airliners never having seeing light of day. Contributing to all this, I look back on my contribution as a minor SS officer might his war years.

Ed. he's a sad and bitter individual and best ignored.

Box Clever

Here's the new-build versus one that I attempted practically a year ago, dismissing it as a result as barely practical... for the use of pre-laminated tiling backer board is a game-changer, reducing the cost, part count and labour involved to a fraction of what went before.

This one is clued-up and glued-up, destined as it is to a life of testing: aren't we all?

By adjusting the template to feature three strips instead of four down the right side, however, a more open accommodation altogether can be assembled like that on the left in the montage.

Then we can sit in it and ride off into the sunset... our work done here, like Shane's.

Indiana Drones and the Template of Doom

I could swear these blog-post titles are getting worse, but here's the one I drafted for our backer-board catamaran. All it asks of you is that the width (viz. height) of the end-caps matches that of the sides, for otherwise like me it is infinitely flexible.

Why Combinator?

Y Combinator is likely the only Californian VC most people outside of California have heard of and one dear to my own heart, having once been under its purview. Best known for backing any number of household names in the digital arena, of late it's been branching out into the physical: first in support of electrical surface-effect and second cargo drones in the shape of Regent and Mayman respectively. They're both in the US, but we mean to get YC to spread their wings farther afield, don't we?

Surface-effect craft or WIGs are something I've been interested in since before the legendary Janes naval directories dedicated one such wholly thereto, viz. Surface Skimmers. Both the directory and indeed the craft died a death until such time that the practicality of electrical motors has endowed them with such an allure that they are among the most successful forms of venture capital outside of flying taxis.

(The picture however is an electrically-powered Norwegian seaplane, me reviewing Regent's efforts elsewhere among these posts. But you get the picture ~ water and electricity appearing to mix after all.)

The jet-powered cargo-lifter has attracted the interest of the US military meanwhile, for though turbines are decidedly thirsty at low-level they are also decidedly fast at that level too. What's interesting about it from my own point of view is its refreshing disregard for redundancy ~ losing one engine having an effect much the same as a leg falling off the kitchen stool.

In warfare (an outdated concept also being re-visited by UK public opinion, were the press to be believed), having a drone drop occasionally is a lesser hazard than being shot at.

Riveting Stuff

Here is the UK's first unmanned helicopter, built by Leonardo (which was Westland, who built US helicopters under licence besides their own until the money ran out) and funded by the government to the tune of £60 million. This is as I recall is much the same as granted Vertical Aerospace, but it doesn't matter... in common with all governments in the western world if you're looking for taxpayer dollars it's best that you have either lots of money in the first place or else none at all.

Not the issue here, though, which is about prototyping. When I first bought cars you could see how they were put together. Modern cars are moulded confectionery with no transparency as to how they work: which is how they like it.

Contrast say the ignition system comprising a distributor, rotor-arm and points that could be repaired at the roadside with a nail-file ~ as once we did ~ with a circuit board that leaves you stranded and awaiting recovery prior expensive replacement.

It's why governments loathe individuals, inventors, and thus individual inventors... they're just not going along with financing taxable products and services that they subsidise in the form of corporations that own all of us... including them.

But you get a peep at what prototyping is all about here, and why my own also look a bit shit. Check out the panels that make up the bodywork and ask whether you'd want your Lambo looking like that prior to cruising Mayfair?

But it's called hard graft, and it's how it all begins.

Ed. Not rivets on closer inspection, but cross-head screws given the apprentice to fit whilst greyer heads go for a cup of tea.

Backer to the Future #8

Here you see how an abutment allows an adhesive bead to be applied from outside the box: in fact it's what's called 'Gluing outside the box' in my TED talk.

Ordinarily this volume is available to liquid fuel or battery-packs prior to sealing, though when the drone's complete I need to figure out where best to stow ballast to suit both hydrodynamic and aerodynamic needs, as just four motors will allow it to hover, fly in ground-effect and plane on surfaces besides water... so I'll park packs elsewhere when it comes to proof-of-concept.

Meanwhile I'll seal edges with an undercoat because (a) it's cheaper than resin and (b) prevents spray-paint from dissolving the foam.

And now if you'll excuse me, there's a chicken roll with my name on it?

Backer to the Future #7

Like many of us old enough to be interested in building a boat rather than stealing one in Grand Theft Auto, the assembly has spread a little around the waist and thus our old friend the long clamp has been used to bring things back into line. We shall work around it when it comes to gluing and patch things up afterward: my recipe for happiness in life, as I explain dressed in saffron on my YouTube channel.

Backer to the Future #6

This is how it should appear once the skewers are driven home, glad to be given a break from wielding sausages. Builders prone to anxiety may wish to use a greater number of skewers, but the uppermost panel fitted so snugly here that I may have got away with none at all: but then that takes decades of wasting your life this way.

The skewers can be removed once the assembly is complete, but many doctors say the risk of removing them would outweigh the benefits.

Backer to the Future #5

What you'd want to do at this stage, especially if you were going to sit there, is fill it with water to see if it leaks; nonetheless we'll move things on and fit the final panel around the top. Like me you'll have wondered how we were going to do that from inside, or how David Copperfield managed it during his recent tour?

Here though I'm interesting my own signature means of joining panels, in the shape of an outside weld. I discovered it during the course of any number of prior builds, which goes to prove that all of those mock-ups we've recycled since have led to this moment of glory.

In order to support the lid while we do this, with the aid of a bradawl we drive one of Asda's finest BBQ skewers through one side at a depth that will allow a seam of adhesive to be applied to the rim that will be formed: 25mm over a 20mm depth of foam as it appears here. These skewers are difficult to drive through the cement, so just use it to mark the far side prior to driving a hole with the tool.

Backer to the Future #4

To ensure the lid is going to fit and to avoid tears down the line I have taken said lid and propped it up inside the part-assembled centre-section while the adhesive sets.

It's things like this that earned me that ISO 9002 accreditation, though the cheque inside the application form probably helped ease its passage.

Backer to the Future #3

A check with set-squares (you can sub a box of cornflakes in extremis) reveals how I omitted to check if the dimensions at the upper end matched those at the lower.

This is not to be overlooked, as if the gap here is too small it won't accommodate a fourth panel that completes the box. Yes, you can trim the panel to suit, but getting it right at this stage will leave you basking in a warm glow.

Do this while the adhesive is still pliable, and you will find it will give a little without needing to be smoothed over again with the crafting (viz. kitchen) knife.

Top tip: don't apply too much adhesive at the joint along the floor of the box as the chances are you'll stick it to the floor. Do it in the lounge and you're walking around it in perpetuity, though it does make for the perfect conversation-starter at parties.

Backer to the Future #2

Next I've applied the caps at either end of what will be the box-section supporting the payload between the pontoons. I've popped one of the weights I use regularly* to secure it temporarily, and driven bamboo skewers into the top end to do much the same. I understand that tornadoes are able to drive stalks of grass into trunks of trees, but in the absence of a tornado I've used a bradawl to get us started here.

Next I've applied adhesive to the innermost joints, and smoothed them into a filet with a knife from the cutlery draw. We shall do the same to outside joints once the assembly is complete, and in either case it binds nicely to the substrate applied to the sheet of foam... which is after all the idea, it having being developed as the go-to means of sticking ceramic tiles to walls.

Incidentally if you are sceptical about this as a practical means of joining parts like this, consider that the trendy new ways of building fast boats that US special forces use ~ built from HDPE ~ are joined by applying the same plastic from a hot gun to form a weld. It has the advantage of speed, but then again there are foamed plastic adhesives which are good to go inside an hour or two if circs require.

Ed. insert 'to keep the fire-door open' as appropriate.

Backer to the Future #1

Here's how I'm making the centre-section. Yes, I know: where are the carbon-fibre pre-pregs, moulds, autoclave and staff? Piling 'em high to both build and sell them cheap requires a little imagination, however, so here I'll experiment with laminated 'backer-board' for this element of the flat-cat.

Invented in China ~ as most things are when it comes to innovative production ~ it consists of an extruded polystyrene (EPS) bounded by polymer cement and fabric mesh. As such it provides a perfect matrix for preparing bathroom or kitchen walls, or for that matter building boats less expensively.

The Ukrainians alone produce over four million drones each year, and if you want to produce in great numbers then a means of continuous production is the way to go. When I first bought a house, the basis for plastering walls and ceilings required any number of laths to be pinned onto timbers to provide purchase: whilst now we use plasterboard which emerges from machines instead, don't we?

What I've done here though is taken 2' by 4' sheet (ideally 1" thick but 20mm here) and taken a 6" slice off each end, before dividing what remains into four strips that form 6" by 36" panels to provide the top, bottom and sides of the accommodation.

I say accommodation because I'd like to skate, sail, hover and fly it one day, though in larval form as it is here it'll be restricted to drones; where we can at least use the space for batteries and electrical components so it looks less jury-rigged altogether.

Jury-rigged ~ me hearties ~ is a nautical term for a mast thrown up temporarily to replace one that was either broken or not quite ready. Its origin may derive from the French for 'day', which may have been how long they generally lasted. I hope my drones last more than a day, but if people start using them to torpedo larger vessels ~ as is fashionable these days ~ they may last no longer than morning dew.

Law of the (Amazonian) Jungle

Amazon is set to trial home deliveries from its testing ground in Darlington, which is among the most economically-deprived areas of the UK. Consider the following: the Goodyear airships in the US are shot at ~ with guns ~ on a regular basis for the joy of it. Second, any number of youths in the UK are paid to do nothing. Third, a trend in the UK is to take out birds using high-powered catapults. Fourthly Amazon is like Ryanair, in being a company people use because they have to and not for love of it.

eBike rentals failed altogether in the UK anywhere north of Oxford, as they tended to get stolen or tipped in the canal; expect then to see the above being taken out soon on a screen near you.

Are they listening? No, because those working on the project have all got well-paid jobs.

The catapults in question are wholly unregulated and fire ball-bearings at a velocity of 350 feet per second ~ think of them as Amazon-primed and ready.

SYO(P)S

The tabloids (and Google's AI) would have you believe the UK government recently supplied 140 British drones to Ukraine at a cost to you and I of £40 million, but in fact they are sourced from New Zealand firm SYOS ~ although they do manufacture on the south coast of England as you'd expect, as we can at least supply both GRP and Japanese outboards to furnish them.

As boats go, it could have been drafted a century ago and it's one reason that albeit reluctantly I need to keep developing the flat-cat: my boat, it's better than yours, I can teach you, but I have to charge.

I've asked the team at Teledrone Verify (that's me and the cat) to look into this and though we know where they are made, we're not revealing that because the Soviets have a habit of paying the unemployed or Eastern European immigrants ~ of which we've many in the UK ~ to go and burn it down.

Nonetheless it's safe I feel to suggest that in the background that's the tower that looks like a sailing boat over in Portsmouth. As ever nowadays, instead of making cars, boats or aeroplanes we just make things that look like them to feel better.

We used to be the ones supplying manufactures to other countries to set up their own facility, tho' invariably this state of affairs appears to have been reversed. It's not altogether a bad thing though ~ the Manchester firm Gardner took a licence to manufacture Otto's atmospheric engine, meaning they cornered the market in just about every four-stroke engine in the UK subsequent.

Absorbed into AEG who made the iconic London double-decker buses, they were eventually bought out by Rolls-Royce... who knew a thing or two about making engines themselves.

Blow Over

Back of the serviette stuff but don't worry about that for now: we'll be building soon enough, but prior a discussion of some of the design elements to consider by way of a primer (as in our case aerodynamic considerations outweigh hydrodynamic).

Broadly speaking any rectangular surface extended into a plane is unstable and if it pitch up at all, will continue to do so. This applies to shallow hulls wholly unsuitable for managing swell ~ as hydroplanes demonstrate top left ~ beside deep multi-hulls that do manage rougher seas. The catamaran at bottom right is one such, but even these (like Campbell's 'Bluebird') are not immune at higher speeds.

A reliable aerodynamic solution to such departures is a tailplane or stabiliser pitched far behind centres of lift and gravity, which gives the leverage required to restrain pitch within limits. An alternative is triangular airfoils or delta-wings that stall during such departures and are therefore self-correcting: planing monohulls approximating such outlines are thus less prone to blow over than rectangular footprints ordinarily used in cats and hydroplanes.

Beyond 100 m.p.h. however powerboats do benefit from the air cushion that passes between the hulls of hydroplanes or catamarans, which is why the bulk of them are built that way. There are fast monohulls, but like the latter these also rely on their sheer extent and weight (besides their power) to sustain high speed upon swell.

What we want from the flat-cat in the sketch is ~ beside delivery and construction in flat-pack form ~ to try and retain the lightest possible weight within the outline of a vessel capable of such speeds, and with an efficiency and economy improved by an order of magnitude.

The world that ~ the way things look to be going ~ measures only speed regardless of the cost to the individual, society and the planet is hopefully in retreat. Speed alone, I told Shania Twain, don't impress me much and measures like kt/kW would be the better yardstick.

And indeed kg/m of length at point of manufacture: some among fast HDPE craft  are pushing 300kg/m, which at the get-go I'd like to improve on by a factor of ten.

Smartillery

Largely unnoticed, an amateur 'space-race' to determine just how fast a quadcopter might be persuaded to travel; with the world record bouncing between places as far apart as China, Australia, Switzerland and South Africa.

It continues a trend toward the atomisation of technology, tools available online to anyone anywhere being used to advance science from within garages or kitchens.

This upends the effectively state-sponsored efforts of the 1930s when millions lined the banks of places like the Solent in order to watch record attempts by the likes of Supermarine. Now with electrical drones pushing the speeds of the fastest propeller driven types developed by this illustrious company, the difference is the millions are instigating progress sat at desks, instead of standing by and watching it play out.

What is interesting too is that the propellers are fixed blade, and not at all twisted to the extent they had to be in order to accommodate the high subsonic speeds a late-model Spitfire might experience: this the result of the extraordinary RPMs that electrical motors can sustain. Equally remarkable is the fact these quads can travel horizontally at all ~ the very shallowest angle of attack at such speeds meaning the body itself generates sufficient lift to be able to dispense with a conventional airfoil.

Inevitable then that they should eventually be used as a kinetic means of anti-drone warfare trialed in places as far apart as Finland and South Korea (where at a recent expo no less than eighty companies were offering such technology).

But can you guess which one?

Ed. It's the one in the middle. It closes its prey at a mere 350 km/hr, whereas that one at bottom right which currently holds the world record tops out at 650 km/hr.

CFD, RIP.

People regularly ask me why I don't use computational fluid dynamics (CFD), or at least they used to until my therapist said it was just voices in my head. Though this is why... a post on one forum bemoaning how the 'mesh' of his rigid inflatable (RIB) is incomplete. What it means subsequent is an incursion of digital water to strains of 'My Heart Will Go On'.

Even with that remedied however it has then to be launched within a separate suite of software, by which time you could have built it in the garage and donned waders.

A reason though I intend to prioritise the catamaran over the mono-ski is because I know it will float level from the get-go with its motors and propellers largely clear of the waterline, whilst lending itself to testing on surfaces beside water and at speeds slow enough to be practical on the smallest of stretches. None of this, love it as we do, could be said of the monoski.

Pipe Dreams

Before we bid goodbye to HDPE and PET products applied to boating, let's look at at a bit of live-action innovation from Indonesia, whose 1500 islands demand at least a passing acquaintance with the arts of the sea. The commentary fears for the fate of rainforest given its ubiquitous use of timber ~ tho' often with a veneer of fibreglass ~ but I told them not to worry in view of the fact it'll soon be gone anyway, orang-utans or not.

What is interesting from the first grab is how the outriggers are now furnished with the sort of foam kids use to stay afloat in swimming pools. But to cut to the chase the firm involved is best known for equipping fish-farms, where they use the sort of HDPE piping that otherwise carries water or liquified gas to form the pontoons that surround each pen.

Moving on we can see how via an intellectual leap they experimented with pinching the ends of a heated tube to form the pontoons of a catamaran, before testing it in model form and doing the same thing on a larger scale altogether with their own custom-made jigs and moulds. This resulted in a line of successful rescue boats like the one appearing in 'Thames Water' yellow.

A little-known fact is that the man who is second in UK rich-lists (where I was catapulted from to 70,004,765 after a post headed 'blow-job') is industrialist James Dyson... whose first project was a landing-craft made of polypropylene pipes!

N.B. I added a comment to the video by way of hands-across-the-ocean intended to establish a worldwide fellowship of those dedicated to deployment of plastic piping at sea: motto 'Aquam potius foris ponamus' viz. 'We put our water on the outside'.

Blow Job

We can't depart these shores without examining the other way polyethylene boats are made, which is by inflating what is much like a warmed-over condom within a two-part mould not unlike that in the previous post but turned through the vertical.

Ed. We wish to apologise to anyone affected by the use of today's title, especially those tuning in from care homes or nurseries. Nonetheless we defend our use of tags such as these along with thumbnails of naked women in order to send our stats through the roof. We do respond to feedback however, which should be directed by pigeon-post to Mr Sergey Brin, c/o Google (who kindly supply our digital soap-box).

FoMo? RoMo!

Let's have a look at a way of building boats that is sweeping all before it, at least at this scale. Pioner contracted out production to this specialist means of manufacture in order to become Norway's best-selling brand, for instance. In many ways it's not unlike cooking, as we'll see by examining the method step by step.

Firstly add plastic pellets... of the sort that we use to fill the oceans so that they end up inside our brains every time we eat fish. With these popped into the mould, affix another mould in the shape of a lid. Now warm it up, and roll it over and over such that it stick to the sides.

Remove the casting, or 'boat' as we experts call it, and trim the edges before adding material to which the floor can be fixed along with parts like the transom that are to be glued and screwed into place.

It's called Rotary Moulding and like much else in the modern world was invented here in Britain as far back as 1855 when it was used to cast artillery shells with a nice even thickness... before the same method was used to make chocolate Easter eggs.

So once where we pioneered the manufacture of shipping vessels, we now specialise in Cadbury's cream eggs instead. Which is us in a nutshell really: lazy bastards who can't even produce confectionery without support from the USA.

Ed. He's being a bit harsh ~ watch the vid and you'll see the machinery involved is actually made by Alan Yorke Engineering in Northamptonshire. Well done Alan!

But It's Been So Empty Without Me.

You can knock the Europeans, but there are glimmers of hope everywhere and even in places like Bradford where they've produced the world's first plastic narrowboat.

Fitting that it should happen in the North of England, where canal boats kicked off an industrial revolution whose aftermath we are still living with... or suffering from.

Meanwhile over the water in Holland they're producing the same sort of thing albeit with a twist of speed. The clue is in the recycling symbol on the bow, which belies the use of HDPE (high-density polyethylene): a material that addresses everything a mariner could hope for.

With the obvious exception of levity, which is where the 'miracle material' that we recently discovered comes in for building boats that may yet fly.

For the takeaway from all this is that plastic sheet is as suited to mass production of fast vessels to the extent steel sheet is for the very largest. 

Though we were beginning to see that, weren't we?