On File

Due PVC Diligence

Before rushing into subbing the skirting for extruded PVC strip, however, it pays to consider its SG and the likely affect on both buoyancy and trim. Happily there is a wonderful resource in the shape of the European Council of Vinyl Manufacturers. As a member myself, I can tell you that they are based in Brussels where their annual jamboree and beer-fest is well attended by dozens of PVC devotees dressed only in orange polymers.

Turning to our screens, however, we can see that unlike laminated extrusions of a mixed density ~ hard on the outside and soft in the middle, like the curate's egg ~ they are exclusively heavier than water.

I fear I am going to have to build a static flotation tank in the garage, which is how the clinical obsession with boats that might fly often presents.

Strip Search

The only feature of the prototype unable to be sourced from Wickes, B & Q or the timber yard round the corner remains the hydroski, which heretofore has comprised a length of laminated uPVC skirting board. Nonetheless here in all its glory is a PVC section that looks to play the part admirably, seeing as it appears to be of a suitable thickness and width viz. either 4" or 5.5".

The only fly in the extrusion is the fact that it retails in minimum quantities of 25m, three off... requiring a low-loader and police escort.

Which frankly I deserve.

Zipline

I've probably filed several hundred patent applications and had many more ideas, and a good while ago it occurred to me that reeling out a pod with an independent means of manoeuvre would be a good deal safer than descending a helicopter to the ground to deliver personnel or payload.

And the thing about the current tech ~ which is ideal for building boats on a small scale and manufacturing them on a large ~ is it makes the commercial impossible possible.

Amazon's much-heralded mode of delivery was never going to work, because they are literally an easy target and as soon as humankind invented guns, it wanted to shoot things out of the sky. Goodyear airships, for instance, sustain a shot a week.

Take bikes and scooters for hire by app: most are abandoned or thrown in the canal where I come from. And the principal target for the current riots in LA? Driverless cars, because they don't have drivers who are likely to get out and shoot you should you be trying to torch them.

Enter then the fastest growing means of delivery out of Africa... and into California.

The drone is launched by catapult ~ as might our boat ~ and enters the hover at its destination. Previously it would drop product by parachute, which works in expanses of rural Africa but not so much in the suburbs of LA.

Instead the delivery box within the pod can be manoeuvred to a point in your back yard the size of a dinner plate, and in winds of up to forty m.p.h.

Key to all this is operational experience, and a robustness that springs from lessons learned. For at the smallest scale and at comparatively low cost you've the luxury to experiment.

And that's where we're coming from.

Power Fixation

A Christmas gift of yore that, like 'Rosebud' the sled, sticks in the mind was a hand-built model plywood boat with a two-stroke diesel not unlike the above. The boat a full three feet long, the engine had to be laboriously started with a length of leather drawstring. When eventually it started (aside some or other lake within one of many parks in Liverpool) my father would launch it from one side whilst we endeavoured to arrest it on the other before its imminent destruction.

Like many such projects, it proved more ornamental than practical and an electric motor ~ with which it was to be somewhat tamed ~ lay for many years in its box.

Firstly, I guess that decades on I'm undertaking that conversion in kind. Secondly it is a reminder that the opening test on water need not require a moveable rudder or indeed a throttle at all.

For like the first torpedoes it could be run at 'full chat' with only a deflector vane to arrest any undue torque and keep it travelling in a straight line.

The difference is too that nowadays there is YouTube, and a moving picture is worth a million words.

TRIG-GER Action

Apply for a Transport Research Innovation grant, which closes in a fortnight's time, on the basis you can't win if you don't buy a ticket.

Applications require a logo, which is a sign of the times I guess.

So I draft one, and tho' the work of five minutes in Pages I'm attached to it already.

There are Nine Million Bi... Drones in Beijing.

The figures are startling, the UK pledging to provide 100,000 drones to Ukraine the coming year instead of the 10,000 prior. The recent defence review unlike previous does not highlight China as a threat, not least am guessing because the drones used in Ukraine are primarily Chinese... because nobody else mass-produces them.

Reason being, private enterprise is more easily pursued in China and the US than it is in the UK, for all its good intentions.

A case in point is Malloy Aeronautics, which we touched on before. Started by a man from New Zealand decamped to Reading in the UK, it raised crowd-funding toward a flying motorcycle, which US company Survice co-developed at Maryland's university with view to selling it to the US military.

Along the way ~ as most of us have discovered ~ they decided developing drones to fly people was a fools errand compared to using them to drop supplies. Since then Malloy has become a part of BAE Systems, though there is barely a clue in the website.

Developing ideas in Britain to be taken elsewhere to be converted into a commercial product is, however, what we do best.

Purchasing product from 'enemies' with which to battle them has always been a part of Kipling's great game... the West provides more funds to Russia through oil and gas purchases than it does to its opponent in the shape of Ukraine.