Samson Post

The very first time I took Felicity Jane out of the marina I got bounced by the wake of  a great big catamaran motor yacht doing 25 in a no-wake zone. I was tied to the fuel dock and the bounce pulled the cleat right out of the foredeck like pulling a candle off a birthday cake. And that was where you were supposed to make fast the anchor rode. Not stout.

Why you would place a cheap plastic ventilator in the middle of the foredeck is beyond me. I broke it jumping off the housetop trying to corral a flying jib halyard. Luckily the hole was perfect for my plan.

That day I made up my mind to have a real Deep-Sea Mariner Samson Post. At first I was going to run it all the way down to the keel like the one on our old wooden cutter "First Light". Then I got the idea of making a giant shipwright's clamp, to sandwich a big chunk of foredeck between two slabs of ironbark bolted hella tight together and drilled out to receive the post.
Back in the day even small ships had a slab or panel of heavy plank arranged on the deck inboard of the hawse to land the anchor and wash her down before catting overside. Inevitably scuffed and splintered all to blazes, when it got too bad the carpenter would just tear it up, heave it over, and build a new one out of dunnage. Called it a billboard.

In the dark ages this stuff was thought to contain a mystical life-essence  because the sawdust turns green on exposure to the air. There's a fine-woodworking lumber store over by East Burnside. They wanted $30 for this 4x4  Lignum Vitae lathe turning blank.

Portland is not a bad place to find the right kind of gummy hardwood the stuff we used to call Ironbark back in the fishing fleet on the coast.
 God only knows what it really was, there are a hundred exotic tropical hardwoods that fit the requirement, hard as the dickens and impervious to fungus even when soaking wet all the whole year round, except for those 12  dry weeks in the Oregon Summer.

My 3/8 drive Ryobi could barely swing the 31/2 inch hole saw, but even this 8/4  Padouk, heavy and gummy as it is, eventually let me through. It took some doing but wasn't too crooked to finally use. I did remember to turn it halfway and come from the other side. That helped.

The day I put it together I nearly got in a fistfight over a chunk of Padouk that one of the locals took a shine to, under my very nose, like a bad-mannered hound will steal your sandwich if you set it down anywhere he can reach.

 The deck plank aka the billboard , I think it is Ipe, is only 3 quarters so it went easy here are all the wood parts nearing their final shape

 I came off the fore-deck with a carpenter's hatchet that wasn't as sharp as it is now but the fellow saw the light and gave up trying to take a chunk that he said was his and I knew was not. Some guys will not listen to a chick. It's like we're not even talking.

The bill-board fitted in place around all the stanchion brackets and the hawsepipe the cardboard template I made actually worked, which kind of surprised me. Sometimes they don't especially on boats  where nothing is level, plumb or square and bevels n two or three planes.

These beaver stick springers held the backing plate just fine while I drilled and pounded up on the foredeck.During the trial assembly I bored a  1/2 inch hole horizontally from the port side through the receiver block, the shaft of the post and out through the side of the block to starboard. Laying on my back with stinky sawdust raining down all over the place. But once I had everything bedded and assembled, a 10"x1/2 inch hex-head bolt cinched up tight really held everything solid as a bomb-proof rock.

I bored six half-inch holes in three pairs all down the length of the billboard. Four of them caged around the post, and one pair as far forward as the receiving block's forward end. Then half-inch stainless carriage bolts bedded in 4200 with washer stacks to spread the load a bit, and some sweaty gruntwork getting the nuts tight. I believe the six bolts grip the foredeck plenty tight.

Stainless carriage bolts and plenty of them clamped all the hardwood plenty tight. That's just plain brass rod for the ears.  Alaska Copper and Brass had some very expensive silicon bronze but they only sell 12 footers. I suppose I could have made all my bolts out of the stuff but I'm not much of a machinist. And I don't have any machines.

The actual fashioning of the parts didn't take very long, really, an afternoon or two down in the cabin in a spate of foul weather. I get a real kick out of this mariner stuff. It's a lot of fun, and I feel a lot safer swinging on the anchor when the tide shifts and really starts to run.
I hang a six inch snatch block from the bow pulpit for a fairlead to keep the chain and rode from chafing on the rail. Works pretty good.
And when I am tied up to the fuel dock I don't worry much when the power cruisers strut their stuff. This here setup is plenty stout.

I set a second little piece of light mahogany on the bow half  for a chafing board, under some Manila pudding. The post has an epoxy fillet all around where it sets through the deck and around the ears. I bedded the plank and the bolts in generous amounts of 4200. I only had to reset one of the bolts that leaked. After that nary a drop. And that post isn't going anyplace.

The installation took most of a Saturday.

Short And Sweet

Where the little tiny label says "CHA FAN" is where there's some power coming OUT of the board. This is not where you put some more power INTO the board. Who knew?

We got some LEDs and some fans running and the message on the screen says "Dude, where's my OS?"

I'm such a rebel.

Hubris UPDATED

Wrote this letter to the computer guy last night. I haven't sent it yet.

HI Geoff;
I got my wonderful beautiful new computer home OK the other night, and I opened it up to look at it and one thing led to another and now I am afraid I have made a series of extremely ill-advised and quite possibly destructive mistakes.
You see, Geoff, I'm a kind of an artist. I'm creative. I am busy all the time making stuff. I needed a sail for my traditional wooden boat, a Grand Banks Dory just like they used to use in the codfishing industry back east so ai got dsome books and I am making a traditional old-time canvas sail with all the lashings and reefing-lines and everything just like they were in the old days, and you know I make all my own ropes. A sail needs a mast, so I got a piece of salvaged 3x4 douglas fir 12 feet long and I made it into a mast using hand tools in the old-time sparmakers fashion and it, and the sail and the ropes are beautiful and highly functional. And I needed a new flannel nightie so I made a beautiful warm pink flannel nightie with lace and ribbon trim and it is a nice thing. I'm teaching myself how to make a really good county-fair-worthy apple pie. I needed a case for my netbook, so I took apart an old leather jacket and made a padded netbook sachet. A couple of years ago I made a Lynx-fur parka with walrus tooth toggle buttons, and I made a pair of matching pigskin gloves lined with Lynx fur.
My point is I make nice  stuff, complicated stuff, and I try to do it the right way.  I study up on how the big boys do it and I put in the time and the effort and learn technique. I do my homework.
Apparently not enough homework in this instance.
So there are some things I had been studying and thinking about to do with cabling and the arrangement of the drives and the harness and just the sheer hands-on. I wanted not only ownership, but authorship.
I  wanted more of a hand in the doing of it. As you may recall I said something about wanting to do the final assembly. I should have left well enough alone, but  I went too far. way too far.
I'm going to tell you exactly what I did even though I know now, and I sort of knew at the time, that I shouldn't. I feel terrible about how far in over my head I am.
I took the harness off the motherboard, and I took out the GPU. I wanted those red thumbscrews in there. I wanted to run the harness a different way. I am sorry but that is what I was thinking. I put the thumbscrews in,  and then I put the GPU back in and then I hooked up the cables, correctly, I thought, but routed the way I wanted them, and I rubber-wrapped the trunk of the harness and I made branch lines like they do and it looked beautiful. I found another black SATA cable so they are all the black ones now, 28 gauge for the SATA3 drives and 30 for the DVD.

If this were an actual rubber hose I would have black and blue marks all over my body.

I changed the run for the CPU fan and plugged it back into its proper header, as well as the case fan. I mounted another case fan in the top of the case. I had to mod it a bit to fit over the RAM but it clears them easily and I did not take the RAM out. I put that clip back on the back of the case over the expansion card slots that you said I didn't need, just because I, in my ignorance, thought it looked better that way.
And of course did something, or several somethings with predictable results.
Now I am back to no-power-up, no-POST.
I am so disappointed with myself but I cannot say I am surprised.
See, Geoff, when you plug in a wire, you know what it is and what exactly it is doing and why it is where it is and how it is. When I do it all I know is where I think it is supposed to go according to what looks like the picture on the diagram. I "know" what the drive is and does, but only by name and from what I have read. You know what it is and does by your life, education and systematic experience. And I don't mean to disrespect that, but I think I kind of did.
I have no idea where I went off the road here, and I am starting to think my worst enemy is my sense of adventure to do unknown things. I really really wanted to do this build and I did not know how little I knew about it. All these kids do this all the time and they make it look easy and fun. Well, it is fun, but not that easy, it is delicate and complicated and things have great meaning even if they look little and unimportant. There's more to this stuff than meets the eye, and I am sorry if it is insulting that somebody like me thinks they can do what you do,  without they have the education that you invested in and the hard-won experience that you have given your professional life to acquire.
Of course when it didn't even blink I took thos stupid thumbscrews out, and I took the rubber wrapping off of there.
And I would walk across hot nails and bring it and more money if you would try and fix this thing.

UPDATE: there's two little 4-pin headers way down at the bottom of the board that says CHA FAN2. There was a 4-pin mini-plug from the power supply that I thought routed the power through the board up to the actual chassis fan at the top. A separate fan circuit, or so I thought. NOT. Apparently you can plug in dozens of chassis fans to this board, which some guys do when they overclock and heat the system all to blazes. Not me. Luckily, if you make this mistake the board knows you fucked up and simply shuts down to give you an opportunity to reflect on your behavior and make deals with the gods concerning penalty and repentance.

Crud Alert UPDATED

Nothing is happening again. Exactly the same way it happened before. Well, not exactly the same way it happened before, but nothing still means nothing even when it is different.
OK I can see I am going to have to explain,
Thanks to untoward events elsewhere my building no longer collects package deliveries for us sheeple consequently when our kindly postman can't rouse us when he has something (which is exactly every time because my buzzer is broken) he takes it back to the Forest Park Post Office. It is not really that far away, so Monday Morning I picked up the new motherboard.
And I took the thing apart and started over and still no joy. I Googled and I surfed and I posted and then I wrote a letter full of longing and sadness to the support folks at Asrock. Lo the heavens fairly boiled and within the hour I had a reply. I'm not kidding I was impressed
Reset the BIOS was what they said, which was new, so I googled, and then I reset the BIOS by clearing the CMOS and switching the jumpers from 1-2 to 2-3 with the battery out and then back to 1-2. Fine. No joy.
I changed the wiring a subtle little bit. No joy.

This big fan is on top of the CPU, the Intel brains of the deal, the Communist Party Usufruct, no just kidding it is the Central Processing Unit. It isn't the only Intel chip on this thing, but it is the royalty. Hence the fan.

Then I noticed, on the underside of the motheboard, up in the very corner of the CPU undermount, a bit of crud.

Underside of same

 All my Boomer Blame genes kicked in. It was a tiny fleck of pink packing foam heavily and adhesively embedded in whatever resinous shellac they coat the finished printed circuit with, and it would not come off without some serious teeth-clenching and tweezering and heartstopping scraping with surgical cedar splint. It is called surgical cedar because if you get a splinter of it in your butt you will need surgery to get it out of there. I speak from personal experience.

Foxconn!  Big surprise!

I never did get the last of it off of there but I am told the stuff isn't conductive and it wasn't my problem.
Darn. It is so nice to have a scapegoat.

All photographs taken with my HTC 4g slide phone camera.

 I'm taking the whole magilla over to Geoff the computer lifter as soon as the last bit I ordered arrives, which may be today if I can catch the package before it goes back to Forest Park.
EDIT: UPDATE
The first thing that  happens when bad things start is I feel like it is because I am a bad person. And then I dive into my guilt and swim around in all the things I should have done different, most of which are not actually what is causing the problem.
I felt bad because I got a cheap power supply, so I sent it back and got good (well, good-er) one. The power supply was not the issue. Then I felt bad because I had cheaped out and only gotten one RAM stick. So I blew another 25 bucks and got a second. Not the problem. Then I got another motherboard. Which didn't fix it. So when Geoff said the second motheboard was also DOA I remembered that I felt bad for getting the cheaper one that didn't have hardly any bells and no whistles at all. I upgraded 10 bucks worth. That unit was backordered, and they said it would be shipped in 2 to 4 weeks., but for another 15 bucks I could have it Monday. Fuck that, cancelled the order. Pissed me off. Then I found that for another 6 bucks ( 6 on top of the 10 on top of the 15) I could have the really good one, the H77M, overclockable, two USB3 ports, all kinds of other bullshit, and for 4 bucks more (now we've gone from $44 to $74) I could have it overnighted here by Friday morning. Hell yes. I stole another hundie out of the stash and good to go, I love Amazon prime. I ordered and cancelled 6 different motherboards and they still love me. They take my calls. They call me back. After each call I get an Email to ask if it was good for me. I don't smoke, but this is when I should light up a cigarette, take a deep drag and let out a long sigh and tap it in the ashtray by the bed.
What a life.

Fresh Pies Up In Here UPDATED

We got busy yesterday morning and made up a batch of crinkle pie dough.My big brother whom I don't see often enough was due around 11 for our planned excursion to see Argo at the Living Room Theater in the afternoon and I was still up to my elbows in flour when he arrived exactly on to the minute on time.
But the work was nearly done and the dough came together fine with just a touch more ice water. I gathered it all up and made two balls to stash in the fridge and mellow out overnight.
When I got home I went back to work on the filling. I did pretty much what I said last time, stewing the apples a little bit, saving the juice, and cooking the thickening flour for a half hour on low in butter. And should note that I do all 4 spices, cinnamon, nutmeg, alspice and cloves. How much of each is none of your business.

I carved my name in the smaller one, and my initials into the big one in case they get lost nobody will eat them behind my back.

I tried to roll out the dough a little thinner. As a result there was enough left over to barely but sufficiently build a second smaller unit. I had to drop back and make more filling but I did have enough apples on hand. There was even a bit of dough left over so I opened up a pint of cherries to fill up a little turnover hand pie type deal. It disappeared immediately.
Tasters report to follow.
EDIT: Tasters Report... Crust :flake is good, more delicate than last pie,9+... filling still good zero slump could be sweeter and a bit more spice8+...appearance/glaze 8.,.,. all-in-all good enough to take some effort to perfect the appearance with a nice glass pan or two, keep it up with the glaze, add 1/4 cup more brown sugar, 3/8 tsp cinnamon, 1/8 each of nutmeg, cloves and allspice...and cut the edge 1" wider from the pan and fold it under before crimping..

RMA

It's not like I'm bored. Or that I ran out of things to do.
My apartment is in a complete uproar these past few days.
Last Thursday the parts I ordered started arriving one after another through Saturday when the last one arrived, my copy of Windows 7 from PC Outlet.
Friday morning I finished adding the rest of the countertop to the island, strips of red cedar, a very nice S-3-S tight knot from Parr's up the street here, picked out of the pile because of the rich color fade from red through pencil brown to gold from the sapwood which is often nearly white. I guess it darkens as it ages  and the fresh layers wrap the older ones deeper and deeper into the tree-trunk as the years go by.

10 lbs of hemp cord that I have yet to touch on the floor there behind the island, and the printer I bought back in September is right behind that still in its box. A little olive oil on the cedar  brought out the color. I really like how it came out. Not quite done yet, though. Later.

I have avoided, so far, stacking computer parts on the island, partly because  I like to admire it whenever it catches my eye. Sometimes the things I make come out with a degree of serendipitous beauty that amazes me.
Well, sometimes. Sometimes they don't come out at all. Case in point:

I can't say the same for my work table, and it is much much worse now. All the packaging had to go someplace, although I got the styrofoam peanuts out of here right away. Keeping most of the boxes for now. Good thing, too

Sunday afternoon I started unboxing and putting shit together. Ran into a bit of a snag later on. Something seems to be defective eventually narrowed down to the motherboard as the culprit. This is why you don't throw away the packaging until its all kosher. Amazon were very nice today about sending me a new one, as was Newegg about the PSU I sent back to them Amazon paid the postage for the RMA (Returned Merchandise Authorization) Newegg did not, however they sent me a newegg beanie for my troubles.

This is what a a nonfunctioning externally built computer looks like.The pretty blue dealiebobbers are the cooling fans in the graphics processor. I took it all apart today. I remain optimistic. This shit is n ot magic. Delicate, but entirely rational. Complicated, too.

So I'm back to working on the sail this evening.
I have approximately a gajillion more grommets to make.