Fixing Fuckups

Wonder of wonders the major sewing is finished. Now I get to do what all conscientious craftsmyn do, fix my fuckups.
Everybody fucks up. The mark of spiritual maturity is how much honest energy you put into fixing those fuckups, and how cheerfully you address the issue.
After finishing the canvas work and laying the finished product out in the hall for measurements I immediately took the thing down to the laundry room here at Williams Plaza and ran the new sail through a hot wash with Arm & Hammer detergent and an hour in a hot dryer.

After an hour on the ironing board in the panic of near despair, I finally got it took look halfway like it should have all along. The way I laid out the reefing band is probably going to prove to be a world-class fuckup, and I did it that way out of sheer vanity, knowing full well where that shit usually gets me.

I need to get the sizing out of the cloth so it will take the tannin uniformly, and I figured I had better get the inevitable shrinkage out of the way before I stitch on the bolt-rope and work in the grommets and cringles.
There's a fuck of a lot of sizing in brand new canvas. One washing by this front loader machine got maybe half of it out. The last time I had new sheets it took three to make them actually feel like clean cotton sheets and not like crumpled aluminum foil.
So I wasn't really surprised when I opened up the dryer and found an ugly crumpled mass still obviously half-full of sizing. I will definitely need to repeat the washing, and maybe again after that. I won't run it through the dryer again. I will try wet-ironing it instead.
As it was I had to iron the shit out of everything with the iron as hot as it would go and a squirt bottle of water in one hand, which made the thing look more or less like it is supposed to. Even the corner patches, six layers thick in places, were like dried seaweed.
So I laid it out in the hall and measured. The cloth shrank like a bastard in length, 111 to start and 98 after, 10 % along the leach. The width at the foot only lost 3 inches,  around 3 % somewhere,

That's the belly band running at the diagonal there, wrinkly as shit and totally interrupting the shape of the cloth. Major malfuntion, which in my infinite vanity I believed wouldn't happen, wouldn't matter if it did, and that I can fix it. Denial. Shit.

  The worst thing is the reef band across the belly 30 inches up. I had a continuous strip that was the full LENGTH of the cloth which I ran the WIDTH of the sail which totally fucked things up.. I should have known, it shrank way more than the cloth under it. Oops. I'l have to pick it off and re-stitch it. It's shrunk now, so I might as well use it.
Then comes all the fun stuff like roping and eyelets and grommets and the finish work where I can show off all my sailor-Jack bullshit.
Tomorrow is my 65th birthday.

Planning Stage

Those are spritsails on the dory lollygagging across the background, not everybody had them. At least the guys in front are getting some fish. All that crap in the boat and there's still room for a ton of codfish.

These guys have a sprit sail rolled up on the mast laying alongside the oarsmen, but there doesn't seem to be that much wind right at the moment. Very impressive mittens, among the many bits of gear worth studying in this photograph.

I get these ideas, see, and they fascinate me somehow, bordering on obsession. Riding the bus, falling asleep, having coffee, lurking on Reddit, my little mind will not shut up about it but I do make progress sometimes and the idea gradually works itself into a recognizable shape. When I am lucky, that is, lucky and honest with myself.
I have never actually seen a working Grand Banks Dory with spritsail complete. I am developing this thing based on what I know from the small craft I have seen and the book by Pete Culler, Skiffs and Schooners kind of the bible for the theory of the thing with a lot of nice drawings.
But not of the "partners", the construct that holds up the mast. In his drawings it is just a hole in a thwart and a block on the floor. The actual ins and outs of mast support aren't mentioned.
I won't have a thwart handy.
There are three in the dory, 2x8 cedar, just planks with a taper on the tips and a notch to locate them at a particular rib (frame) to sit on and row or if you are lucky, to sit on while somebdy else rows. They fit on the third, fourth and fifth frames.
I want the mast to go on the second frame from the bow.

I think I will have only one of the little arches and the horizontal breadboard type slab wiith the hole in it. But this is the idea that solved the most of the problems.

SO the necessity turned my mind to possible solutions, and I considered one thing and another, ways you could get a cross piece on there with a place to secure the mast. The block on the floor is a given as long as it spans enough width to spread the force across enough planks to even out the load.
I made a little drawing, which is not, I should warn you, an architectural plan, but a concept sketch. I liked it.
It seemed to me that the seat-plank type deal wasn't very high in the boat and that there might be too much leverage against it if the wind started to cook like it hopefully does, after all I have a reefing band and if you reef your sail the wind is cooking for sure.
Another trip over to the salvage yard, where they soaked me 16 bucks for a slab of old  growth 2x8, which I brought home on the bus. People looked, but nobody laughed.

I'm pretty good at working things down gradually enough to make a snug fit. I made a big bedstead once that had no fastenings or glue. You assembled it with a mallet. Anywaythis bracket will be easy enough to make, with notches and tabs and insert part B into slot A type thing.

 Later on the drawings and planning changed from the support to how to hold  that up in some kind of way that would allow the whole thing to come off and stow away.

This is the part that kept me obsessed with the subject, but I think you could make part of this bracket rotate like the latch on the door Almanzo made for Laura and Ma's Little House on the Prairie.

Some time soon we will have a nice discussion about how this shit actually corresponds with reality...

Dipsomania

Jim Lemay loves his chainsaw.
He got a new one this fall and it is a crackerjack.
He and my sister Mel live in the foothills of the Siskyous down by Ashland, and there are many trees on their little hillside rancho.
Ex-logger + giant new Stihl chanisaw + trees = noise of small engine and crashing and now and then a real  substantial THUD.
I've got all this canvas and hemp both of which are notorious rot magnets, and in the old days some sailors tanned their sails.

St Johns Nova Scotia a fish store painted with the old codfish ocher paint, several years after the last coat was applied.

In Nova Scotia, home of the Grand Banks Dory fleet, they would mix up a gallon of cod liver oil and about five pounds of powdered Red Ocher clay and some pine tar and lay their sails oot on the gravel and paint a generous coat of this shit  throughout, and go fishing the next day. Not me. Too stinky and sticky. But a beautiful color, kind of a lively bright raw red.

Not the effect I am looking for. Lively nonetheless. Ocher is basically hematite in clay, much to the delight of East Africa.

Me and Jim set out to harvet some Black Oak bark chips, which took about seven minutes with that giant saw. Jim merely touched the spinning chain to the inch thick bark of an oak stump and the sawdust flew in a  flurry snowdrift onto a sheet of cardboard we had laid out to receive. The chips were a kind of a creamy white in color.
However by the time I got two gallon sized ziplocs of them home, the chips were a delicious shade of scarlet.

And so was the water that I soaked a cupful in just to see what was going to happen to my test-patch of canvas.

 
Not much, but it did start the deal, and a couple days later I did a second soak, just like you do with a deerhide in the tanning process. With the cloth you rinse, dry, repeat, until you get the shade you want.
I know from my previous exeriments that tannin residue in the cotton canvas cloth inhibits rot to a surprising degree. And the second soak was a bit darker in result than the first, so I do think I have the process I will eventually use.

Much better color after the second dip.Although the fungicide properties of the tannin are infused in this test patch, the color isn't there yet. I have a secret strategy for getting the color to the traditional shade of red that involves logwood chips, a traditional red dyestuff.

Sequence

Yesterday at the Powell Paint Center, my new favorite place in Portland,  there were 3 guys behind the counter and no other customers in the store. Each of the 3 guys thought the other was helping me, and nobody wanted to poach, so after I wandered around for 10 minutes oohing and ahing as the significance of all the little doodads and professional painters' gizmos came back to me in a dense and sweet nostalgia, I stood at the counter for quite some time as the three men avoided eye contact, busy with small things in their own 3 little worlds.
Finally, trying not to sound as annoyed as I was starting to feel, I asked if somebody could please help me.
They all exploded in embarassment at once, and I immediately saw what had happened and I was able to  help smooth feathers and milk the humor in the situation.

A brush worthy of the work that went into my project. That's all I wanted

 The guy I wound up with was such a helpful nice man, a pro, a working man's resource, old-timer at 45 or 50 ( It breaks my heart that I am so much older than such mature men) , sympathetic and knowledgeable, spent a very agreeable half hour talking the business with me. I had been looking for a 2 inch straight cut hog bristle brush of good quality which I could not find. I suspected I was looking right at it but there's this thing where I'm right on top of shit and it will not break into my notice. Happens a lot. Sure enough there it was, a beautiful brush, well formed, soft, nice stainless ferrule.

This morning I rinsed it in some Penetrol, to prime the bristles and condition them to take and release the material more readily, and with it I applied the second coat of boiled linseed oil to the now finished mast.
Linseed Oil is a surprisingly robust finish for Doug Fir, and you can spend a lot of money and a heck of a lot of time before you surpass its durability and quiet handsome gleam..which is to say the mast is done, done fairly well, looks like the real old-time thing, and it deserves that kind of understated covering material applied with such a brush worthy of its task...

Smells really nice in here now.

Here's a retrospective in photos of the whole project:

Pete Culler says, and I agree,  you should never cut to the exact length until you absolutely have to. There was 4 feet of extra material to remove. It made me nervous, so I left an extra  few inches on the stick, which I never have cut off. The markings for the rip layouts showed up nice on the kerf. This was my first look at the grain of the stock, and I was thrilled.

Measure, mark and remeasure. I almost got in trouble right off.  I couldn't find my straight-edge batten and the board I used was warped like the dickens. I finally calmed down enough to hang a string and go from there, working off a centerline. I don't know why it takes me so long to start doing it right.

And then do it all again on the fresh surface. I learned a lot about tool control. I have a new respect for the craftsmen who built stuff back in thedays of Henry The Navigator before measurements were standardized, and an ell meant from your elbow to your fingertips and an inch was a knucklebone.

This is a rare view of a newly exposed face of the butt taper with no markings on it whatsoever. I have a bad habit of making hasty mistaken marks and ending up with a mishmash of erasures and crosshatchings.

And then I started in with the planing.

Double Taper

The little 6-strand Round Sinnet halyard I made out of hemp will thread up through this pully some day.

Finish

Just one coat of linseed oil brought out the rutilations, a term referring to the shimmery striations running across the grain at right angles, barely visible in this photo, in this old Douglas Fir like on a star sapphire, only these don't converge in a star effect, they are parallel. The cedar filler pegs look like the moons of Saturn in the rings of unsolidified interstellar gases...

I did find a place to hang my newly oiled  mast out of the way, against the wall behind my worktable, a kind of a tableux shrine of all the best-loved things remaining in my world. That's my kid on the wall, goofy in his Junior year at Marshfield High. The little doily contains symbolic gilded relics of my trip to Thailand, a shrine to an old guru, a beech-nut from Mark Twain's yard and a sponge from the beach at Key West. There is an  Orthodox crucifix  (Ethiopian, not Russian)  of Ebony set with precious stones that I made many years ago during my Rastafarian period, and a marble relief carving symbolizing illumination from even earlier than that, when Jeff was a baby.
Off to the right is my voodoo doll by the medicine chest I made  in a creative frenzy over a couple of rainy days on Felicity Jane two  winters ago.
I'll do another couple of coats of the boiled Linseed oil, it has a very agreeable odor and a very forgiving nature for its application. It tolerates an unsteady brush and a bump or two without complaint.

Round and Round

Turns out I didn't need as much 80 grit sandpaper as I thought.
Wandering around inner Southeast Portland in the rain the other day I stopped in at the Miller Paint store and confirmed what I already suspected, they are the paint bullshitters of Portland, with upscale creepy exhomeimprovement management assholes behind the counter, and homeowner material on sale, unlike the old days when they were the real deal. Not any more. I wanted 80 grit paper, they had it only in packs of 100 sheets. They did have those half-assed variety packs and they included 60 grit only, and a woodworker can't use it. Homeowners do, but its a false economy. Sure you get the old shit off off there fast, but you pay for that with deep scratches from the big grit and it takes you far longer to get the scratches out than it would have...They don't sell metal workpots anymore, and the chick tried to tell me they don't make an oil-based enamel primer.. I now officially hate those bastards, even though the primer, Pure Paint, that they actually do still make is the best in the business.
The little Ace Hardware (chain-2 strikes already) that used to be in Uptown and is now down in the hardware ghetto by Chowns down by the freeway, amazingly had paper by the sheet, so I got 5 sheets 80, 2 sheets 120 and a 180.
The little mast is done, even the sheave in the masthead came out nice, all the holes and the marking of same done a bit on the voodoo side since nothing is parallel anymore, but they lined right up and it looks just like the big boys.

With a rat-tail rasp it was easy to file a groove around a  chunk of seasoned Cherry branch I had on stash for carving spoons. Slabbed that off like makeing a cookie from frozen cookie dough, drilled a hole in the middle, and that made the sheave. The axle is a chunk of #4 copper wire thrust through a gob of tallow and peened over a pair of washers to make a  very functional improvised rivet.

When all that crazy handsaw workout was over, I made a little jig to mark the tapered slab, 4 sided, with paralell lines so that when you plane off the corners, voila, 8-sided and good to go.

My new Canon copier was just the right height to carry one end. I'm having a war with HP, but I'm too lazy to change them out, so I have the Canon nearby to intimidate my HP into acting right. So far so good.

The dips and wiggles from the handsaw made those guidelines  an approximation, but it did tend to agree with itself, so I took it down to the octagon with Bob's supersharp jack plane and its #4 pal. The big boys do it again down to 16 sided, but it was pretty rough, and my jury-rig marking jig was too general to get that specific so I took it the rest of the way by eye, which worked out ok.

I found this diagram after I had the thing done just to show you what its supposed to look like and yes to brag a bit about the halfassed thing I made and used

1979 Wooden Boat Symposium I heard a lecture by Harold "Dynamite" Payson who described this sparmaker's jig among other extremely usefull doodads for the shop. I used them all, but I waited 33 years to make this one. It did the job I did look around on the web to refresh my memory, but I didn't find much until it was already over. Dynamite Payson is one of the Greybeards of traditional boatbuilding and an accessible and truly nice guy.

 I did have to watch myself, I was having so much fun with those sharp-ass planes I could easily have gone too far in a very short time.
But I did the last tiny soft shavings with an even smaller one-handed affair, a little block plane given me by my pal Nan Kitchens whan I was in Key Largo last year, and I managed to get it sharp as the others and it did the trick.
I dragged the stick out to the backyard to the smokers' pavillion officially known as the Barbecue Shelter (no barbecue allowed, another strange tale) and I spent an agreeable if slightly chilly and damp afternoon and only one sheet of 80s and by god the thing was round, tapered, and looking like it had always been that way.
Yesterday I rigged up a dust collector which was really only the hoover hose hung from a string pointed right at the work at my knee to keep the dust from the 120s under control as I made all smooth.
I was like a little kid, I couldn't stop look at it and petting it like you do the baby's forehead wondering how something could be so soft and smooth.

Pegolation

You know how when you start a project it seems like such a complicated thing you will never get past all the technical difficulties?
And then you just put your head down and one thing after another, you just get into it?

And then one day you say to yourself "Holy shit, I'm almost done!"

You get a little twinge of separation anxiety when you think about not having more to do, it was such a part of your life.

That's me.

The cutoff scraps are piled up on the floor to the right. And my latest trip to the Devil Store yielded the cute little wooden boatbuilder's clamp which I always wanted one and I thought the guys who had and used them were pretty much the shizznit.

I did sweep the floor yestaerday, but I look around this place and there are planered-off curling wood shavings in every odd corner. I stuffed a giant paper grocery bag as full as it would get yesterday and the day before. With a pair of very sharp hand planes the shavings just seem to float off by means of the gesture alone, there doesn't seem to be any actual resistance work involved.

That piece of brown leather was given to me by Brother Bob for crafts but I like to look at it draped over the couch, and I only very reluctantly use any of it for actual crafts. I did split up the ropemaking jig he made me to make pegs out of, it was an early prototype that had been redesigned and reiterated. I did hate to cut it up, it was a beautiful thing on its own. But we must sacrifice for art.

Last night I whittled some scraps of red cedar into little pegs to tap into all the little nail holes in the, what is now clearly mast, which is no longer just a slab of used lumber, but a slender graceful thing of its own.
Somehow "mast-ness" has been incarnated into a slab of salvage, astonishing and beautiful. I'm thinking I shall take my time in these last stages and enjoy the sight and the feel of this fine thing, this blushing peach tinted thing revealed from the heart of some ancient forest giant..

Rehab

Even I knew the only chance I had was to shut up and go to rehab. It was bad, the condition of my life,  and I didn't care.
I did alienate my entire family.
And then I changed genders, and I did care again, a lot, but in terms of family public relations, an unbridgeable double chasm of weird.
In 2008 my sister Marilyn was the first of the sibs to take a chance and meet up. Cool.
In 2010 my brother Bob took the plunge, traveling from Salem to Scappoose to meet up on the Felicity Jane at the dock of McCuddy's Landing, not exactly the dock of the bay, but close enough. And then we were friends again. That Fall the three of us kids (all 60+  or as close as makes no difference) met up with Mom for lunch down at the coast, on the bayfront at Florence, Oregon.
Nice.
But the other sister, Suzy, didn't buy in at all.

Mom is shrinking.

 Nor did my kid, Jeff, yield hardly any slack. He was busy, in Azerbaijan, and I failed to make even a blip on his radar. Fair enough, I told you already it was bad.

A tall, handsome, terribly serious and exceedingly polite young man.

 My stepdad, Alan, died last fall, 2011, and we all of us met up in Coos Bay at the cemetary and then the church for his services. Tell the truth, him and me didn't see eye to eye about very much, but I was sad to see him go, and he did me a solid on the way out. The meet-up.
I kept my mouth shut. I felt humbled and priveleged to be there. Really.
This year we all of us got together at Mayrilyn and Jim's place up the hill one ridge over from Mount Ashland.
Suzy and Larry were very nice, Larry let me tag along on him and Jim's whirlwind Black Friday shopping extravaganza, Mom was old as weathered granite and we all ate a lot of very good stuff. I made Ambrosia, which seemed to have hit the mark, and coconut candied yams which fell considerably short. I have an idea for a sweet orange-pineapple reduction which should make a difference and I shall try it again next year.

Larry is an actual Rocket Scientist

I went shrooming, soaked in the hot tub, and me and Jim chopped up some Oak Bark to tan my spritsail, the day after this massive and highly successful family dinner.

These are not Chantrelles, you can tell because the gills do not connect to the stem. The color is roughly similar, but Chantrelles have a fluted irregular trumpet shape.

 I kept my mouth shut.
It seems to be working.

Power Move

The Good Part

I think I may have died and gone to heaven.
The other night I spent a wonderful hour tuning up my brother's big jack plane, getting all the rust and crud off it, not much really, and then putting it through the whole kosher three-stones-and-two-strop sharpening cycle. I was aware, for that hour, that I was as fully engaged in the love of pure life experience as I have ever been in my long strange life.
This afternoon I finished the fourth of the eight rip cuts on the mast blank. I  have learned a lot in these twenty-four feet of sawyer work, mostly how to pay attention and be honest with myself and check shit out with the instruments. I live too much of my life on autop[ilot and self-assurances that all is fine, a kind of magical thinking that I know without actually looking, whether or not I am operating correctly within acceptable parameters. Usually I am not, and the feeling of knowing has absolutely no correspondence with the facts.
So I now know how to make a twelve foot cut accurately with a handsaw, which is harder than it looks. The key is to check with the try-square whether the sawblade is at right angles with the face of the work, and  every foot or so to roll the work over and cut from the other side. You cut at an angle, so when you roll over you are then cutting into your kerf so the under side of the blade is now following the cut you made while looking at that line, and you guide the blade on the line on your now side and things don't wander off too far and hey this last slab isn't too bad at all.
And this is what we call a good time at my house.
Just now, in laying out the guidelines for sides 5 through 8 I had occasion to try and even up some of the more egregious wandermarks from the time long ago when I was still in denial about magical thinking and mystical knowledge and the cut kerf wandered around like, as Reggie GIlmartin used to say at Bandon Erection, like a snake on a rock.
I will tell you one thing: That fucking jack plane is sharp as shit. Sliced that old doug fir like greasy bacon, and one more thing, too.
This here old growth fir is beautiful stuff, rich and peach-red, grain so close together it looks like the edges of the pages of an old and well-written book.

Stuff

Fuck you, Mitt Romney. You are right about the stuff thing, though. I voted for Bronco Bamma because he promised us more stuff. Stuff like a rational foreign policy, and an economic policy based on scholarly study of real world forces. Stuff like control for women of our own bodies, and equality for minority groups, and if you think that means people marrying objects or pets you're the pervert, to even think that up. I know, I know, we all see the world through the lens of our own prejudice. I guess that means  guys like you are really in it for the money. Big surprise...
And, yes, stuff, material things, for myself as well. Stuff like food,so that even the fucked-up and stupid like me have something to eat. Stuff, like as much public commitment to the health of my body and mind as there is for fighting fires in your garage elevator. The public supports full no-expense-spared firefighting facilities and teams for any careless asshole with too much stuff passed out drunk or too  busy fundraising to set the sprinkler system or pay a decent wage to the guy who looks out for shit like that. Healthcare should be the same, after all its guys like you that pay for the ER care for folks like me with no insurance. Wise up!
Bronco Bamma promised me stuff like, say, schools for the neighborhood kids, and books with actual science and history so we don't keep making the same fucked up self centered delusional choices as a society and stop killing the world.
And a warm place to take a shit!
Wish you were here.

CVG

If you have a sail for your boat you will not get very far if you do not also have a mast from which to fly your sail.
Back in the day I rowed out to Valino Island in South Slough by where we lived and I chopped down a little Port Orford Cedar. Bad girl, yes, but fuck you it was a long time ago. And actually I did not chop it down, I used a hand saw. The thing was maybe ten or twelve feet tall and three inches in diameter. After I got all the bark off, and let me say the Port Orford Cedar smells like the better neighborhoods in heaven, and sanded it down a couple coats of boiled linseed oil made a wonderful soft smooth stick of wood for my  spritsail I made fron Kmart nylon.
Unfortunately Hayden Island does not have any Cedar Trees, only stupid mcrooked-ass cottonwoods. Which also smell wonderful when they are in leaf, but the wood is lousy for making shit.
And as defiant as I might think myself, I'm really pretty tame and I wasn't, in the end, attracted to the pirate logger solution. even though there is a Red Cedar grove alongside Hwy 30 between St Helens and Rainier.
Last Sunday my pal Maggi and I ran around North Portland to look at salvaged lumber at a couple of places and Lo and Behold there was, at the Salvage Center where Harvey Hardcock used to work, a pair of clear vertical grain old-growth Douglas Fir 3x4 sixteen feet, or as close as makes no difference, perfectly knot-free straight grain perfectly cured and dry for perhaps a hundred years.

There's 20 grains to the inch.Those are nail marks near the layout lines, after all , this beam held up somebody's beaverboard front porch ceiling for many years. You can fill them with  a splinter and some glue and call it a dowel and feel quite properly bloated with your skills.

This is an amazing thing to find. This shit takes a thousand years to grow, and there just isn't any more of it being cut.
And nobody in their right mind made 3x4, even though that is exactly what you need to make a proper pair of oars unless you want a glue joint down the middle. And there is a mast in the other piece as well.
These mugs at the Salvage Center, cleaning and warehousing building material donated for recycling by all kinds of cool leftwing Portlanders, aren't in this for the money, because they only asked for a dollar a lineal foot. I would have paid five, and you would pay 7 or 8 if you could find it new in a specialty yard like Crosscuts or Woodcrafters.

In my infinite vanity I imagine myself capable of makeing a mast and pair of oars using only hand tools!
The mast, 11 feet long, round in cross-section, 2 3/4 inches in diameter at the partners tapering to 1 3/4 at the tip and butt, will require approximately 48 feet of ripsawing with an ordinary carpenter's handsaw/
Last night I laid out the first two full-lengh side cuts, and later on I got out my new old handsaw and I went to work. Unfortunately my rate of cut is about one foot an hour.

I will be looking for a saw-sharpening service quite soon. There used to be an old retired logger or two in every town in Oregon with a little sign on his garage who amused himself with an excuse to put on his hickory shirt and stagged-off tin pants and dip snoose and spit in the garage all day. There don't seem to be many of those guys left.

And that's not even counting the work with the jack plane to make it round, and, please, shut up about the oars.
 It's going to be a long winter.

PS EDIT: Nov 9th--Today I cut off a two inch wide strip of the walnut dyed canvas, got it quite wet but not dripping, put it in a baggie on the windowsill above the baseboard heater to see if it will mildew. I did the same to a piece of undyed plain canvas for a control. Check back later. (Actually this was on the 29th Oct)

EDIT2: Nov 15th There's little black spots of mildew on the untreated piece of canvas on the windowsill. I can't tell if the other one, the treated sample, the walnut dye-job, has any or not because of the color. I willl give it a few more days and then break the seal and really try to make a determination.

EDIT 3: Nov 24th I took the dyed brown strip out of its bag today and it looks like it is finally getting a bit of mildew started. I dont think it was there on the 22 when last I looked.
The undyed strip has a lot more mildew spots now but it used up all the moisture. I think my point is proven, that the dye inhibits frungal growth, but it doesn't stop it completely...more later...

Treatment

Mixture for rope treatment

In a 4 qt copper-bottom saucepan floating in a big pan of water on medium heat.

Commode wax 47 grams

50 cc kerosene

50 cc turpentine

30 cc pine tar mixture.

10 minutes warm to touch, wax beginning to dissolve

20 minutes quite hot wax dissolved with vigorous stirring

heat off

I dipped the 6 strand round sinnet halyard/laceline which absorbed readily the hot mixture. I squeezed the rope through my gloved fingers, draining the excess back into the pan.

I likewise dipped the snotter and mangled off the excess.

The last thing was the twin fox nettles on the big pully block.

There was approx 30-50 cc of mixture remaining, which I put back into the small pine-tar can.

I put the treated lines in a cardboard tray and set it on the toilet with the exhaust fan left running. Cleanup was with paper towels which I put out in the dumpster.

I put the canvas rags in a double ziploc in with the rest of the stinky stuff to offgas the volatiles.

This stuff had stink like a tar-baby, eye-watering pine smell, like that time at computer school where the substitute had a germ phobia and scrubbed all the keyboards with pine-sol. I shut the batrroom door and ran the exhaust fan all day while I was out.

Then I broke out that wax commode ring, what was left of it anyway.

See the way I did the braided ropes by separating the yarns it made all the fibers stick out from the rope all fuzzy, and dipping it in the pine-tar solution did not help. All the pine tar went into the body of the braid nice and dark but the fuzz was still there. So I gooped up some of the ring-wax, which is soft and sticky, and smeared the wax into that fuzzy looking sinnet and guess what it worked just fine and lathered the fuzz down just right and it made it look like some kind of industrial leather substitute. I was a bit worried that it would rub off on my hands and clothes and stuff but it is just fine. 

I hereby declare this process a success.

Then last night I had a dream that I was in Donald Trump's apartment and he had let loose a gorilla to get me, a big old silverback, and I was scared as shit, but just then this big kangaroo got the gorilla from behind in a headlock, a rear naked choke, and the gorilla passed right out, collapsed out cold or dead even maybe, I didn't stick around to find out.

Dye Happy

We have been having some  fun over at my house..
Issue being that canvas and hemp rope are both notoriously susceptible to mildew and rot. Ideal culture medium, really. So over the years the people who dealt with it daily developed strategies to cope with its shortcomings and avoid some of the worst of the damage.
They generally used rope infused with pine tar during the spinning process although that reduces the strength of the rope by about 20%. It keeps the moisture out of the fibers and also inhibits the fungi somewhat from growing in the fibers. So as long as they didn't get stupid, and they allowed the ropes to dry out as much as possible before closing it away for storage, the rope lasted a reasonably long time. And used worn out rope was also a valuable commodity. Virtually all paper was made from old rope until some Canadian asshole figured out how to get fiber for paper out of wood chips. Our old friend Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, took the process to industrial scale and then cornered the market in wood pulp for his English newspapers but I digress.

The canvas is a different story, they couldn't do the tar process because of the added weight and the smaller coastal and fishing vessels developed a tanning process that turns the canvas a nice reddish brown, I'm sure you have all seen the sentimentalist pictures  in magazines.
Me, I'm wondering if that actually works, so yesterday I did an experiment. I didn't have any tanbark handy, so I went over to Lincoln High School and picked up a couple baggies full of green walnuts with husks still on. A bit awkward, me in my giant orange hazmat gloves, kids everywhere, but nobody seemed to mind me scurrying around the lawn gathering shit up.

Frozen husks from a dozen nut-balls. Need I say more?

 I did take the actual nuts out, a nasty business, there is so much tannin in the husks that they color everything it touches and I did remember to wear my hazmat gloves and I got away without much damage.
I did a bit of prep, washing the squares of canvas samples with Joy detergent, and dried them in the oven, and then boiled them an hour in an alum/baking soda pre-mordant fixative. Then dried again in the oven on low.

What a mess! Every time I checked the canvas sample the shit went all over the stove. I had a painters strainer bag left overt from when me and Terry were making hashish

Crowning achievement was a three hour boil with a screen-bag of husks, and when I was tired and absolutely bored I declared science satisfied and drained, rinsed and dried the sample.

I'm not perfectly satisfied with the colorIt is nice and brown, though. More mordant might help. Thanksgiving I'm going down to Mel and Jims in the Siskyou Mts and they say there's lots of oak trees and I can chop off some bark.I don't care so much about the color, as the effect on mildew.

Next is to fuck with the tar and the rope. Pine tar is quite stinky and so is turpentine, so I am a little  bit leery
of doing very much of this shit in my apartment, and then it has to dry and off-gas for a while so the tar gets dried out and wont get all over everything it touches, but I am notorious for, in the end, not really giving a shit about the niceties when science is to be served. I might be a queer but I'm no sissy...
We shall see.

EDIT: Nov 9th--Today I cut off a two inch wide satrip of this sample, got it quite wet but not dripping, put it in a baggie on the windowsill above the baseboard heater to see if it will mildew. I did the same to a piece of undyed plain canvas for a control. Check back later.

A Funny Thing--Details

MY hair is falling out like a bastard maniac. It is everywhere, on my clothing , the furniture, the floor. The little rivets on my purse are perfect little hair harvesters, every time the sunlight catches it there is a silver penumbra of strands hovering about.
The Interferon is out of my system, but the effects are more lasting. I'm not really complaining, it is a fine thing to be free of the disgusting consequences of my young stupid innocence.

But that is not the funny thing itself.

 I got some bullshit fake manila from China/Ebay,  probably not even real Manila which is supposed to be made from Abaca Banana leaves, it smells stinky like creosote and it is rough as a cob, and I didn't want to use it for a bolt-rope, and why should I when I have learned myself how to make the real thing.

After all the processes were processed and the jacks were all back in their boxes I could see why the old-timers could spend hours and days and lifetimes handling hemp rope and the scraps and shreds of yarns. The stuff is beautiful.

This here hempen rope project is moving right along and reaching a stage of confidence and completion.
Hemp is a natural fiber, the European variety producing longer strands, which is what I have been using, but they start and stop throughout the length of the yarns, and when you look close the effect is a bit shaggy.

I am thoroughly hooked on the process as well as the product, but the closer you look, the drinker you smoke, and the player you get. Or something. I had to make myself stop and go to bed last night at one AM.

So last night I was putting the finishing touches on my new bolt-rope and terribly satisfied with the product, inordinately proud of myself,  when the light caught it just right and I saw where the hemp had, over the several days of working with the jig and the spacer in my apartment and dragging back and forth across the tile floor, the fibers of the rope had pretty effectively swept up about a metric dick-load of cast-off hairs and the entire length of hemp had a halo of silver hair radiating like accompanying angels.

This stuff feels like it is alive in your hand, soft and strong and cunning. A pass through a flame and it will be just right. Stinky, although I cannot recall a more agreeable stench.

But I have read the literature.

What the authorities say to do, if your rope has shaggy bits, is to singe them off like you do when you pluck the Christmas Goose. So that is what I did. Now my apartment stinks of burning hair, which is fine, I am overwhelmed with the stuff and you can't get rid of it so it might as well burn it, and burning hair does stink. .  And so does burning hemp.

1968, when this was taken, was one thing, but the following summer there was no pot to be had in San Francisco. I remember in particular one night out at Morningstar Ranch in upper outer Marin County stripping stems and smashing seeds and not getting high, not really, even though we thought we might, and we said we did,  a little anyway. I woke up with a very sore throat but I dropped acid anyway.

And Oh Lord that pungent smell takes me back. To the summer of '69, the great reefer drought, smoking the stems, when we all sat around and dug out the rolling box, and stripped all the skin off the stems left over, and the entire west coast stunk to  high heaven of burning marijuana sticks limbs and branches, the stink of it now in my apartment and I associate that sharp sour smell with panhandling for  gallon jugs of Red Mountain wine, and with the soul mystery of patchouli oil, and my god that was half a century ago. A peculiar smell will do that,  take you right back to the day, as if time had stood still..I had such hope then...I was so very young.

This is actually the waiting room at the free clinic but it reminds me of every crash pad in the Haight.

Looks Easy

This shit is hard. Making hemp rope.
I get all sweaty and OCD driven and when I am out there past the very edge of what I know how to do out in the shit I have thought about and think I have the idea but have never actually done. It is a terrifying and lonely place. And then somehow it starts to resemble something I recognize and I start to have hope once again. Which alternates with despair until the thing is over and done with.
I used to think it was the crank that made me like that but I am just the same at 12 years clean. Utterly absorbed, concentrating to the point where I actually start to drool and I have to remember to close my mouth and swallow.

Bob came up last week and we made some railroad sinnet, a simple two-strand affair made out of spun yarn, hemp in this case. It was not as easy as it looked in the diagram, and I had to make some adjustments and tighten shit up quite a bit but we got a 40 foot chunk of usable material.

They call it railroad sinnett because it is two yarns paralell but twisted. That's the scrap of it with green tape on the end. You make baggywrinkle out of it by tucking bits of chopped off rope yarn scrap between the strands.

Thursday I made another one by myself, which is harder in a way, but also easier because I didn't have to explain anything or verbalize anything I could just work with my hands hardwired to my imagination. Nice. Later on Friday I got some cedar scraps out of the junkbin at Parr Lumber and I made a new jig with some improvements, which was actually slightly easier to use. I have to be careful, a lot of times it's not the machine, it's the operator.

This jig is bigger than  the first one, separating the hooks and thus the strands a bit more so they dont get all up in each others shizzness. You can see the elements still hooked over the spinner hooks.

So today I finally got my nuts up and I went downstairs to the yard behind our building where there is sufficient room to spread this shit out and I hooked it all up and started to try and actually make some rope, and once again Iwas out there past all familiar landscape and into the agony of facing whether or not I am full of delusional bullshit, a not unknown outcome, and it is only the fact that it was really threatening to rain that I had to break off and come inside, project begun. Project far from completion, though.

At first the yarns want to be like they always do, it's a habit of shape, and it takes a minute for the fibers to wake up and realize things have changed and then to relax into the new shape.I know how they feel. This is the glob of interrupted project I am left to try and not fuck with until I get a chance to spread it out again outside.

 The spun yarn is left-hand laid, the twist is anti-clockwise. So when you twist it into sinnet it comes out right-laid. Fine. Then when you twist the 3 elements of sinnet together it come out in what they call left-laid cable, which is rope made out of twisted elements of more than one strand. So I have a bit of left-laid 3-strand Hungarian hemp cable-laid rope for the edges of my spritsail.

This here is what it is supposed to look like and I for one think it looks the real old-time article and will be a fine thing to have on the boat. I will get more mileage bragging about how I did it than I will out of the sail itself.

I think it will work OK in the end, its big enough around and feels quite strong but I will tell you this one thing, it is a lot harder than I thought it would be and it does not come together by itself. At first it was like "Oh fuck me this ain't working"and it just kind of lays there in a kind of unhealthy-looking gob  but when I started to fuck with it in that particular desperate kind of "don't do this to me" way lo and behold, it actually began to look like rope, and then, miracle, to actually BE actual rope.
We were very happy.