I'm going to have to watch those videos. My dream retirement is to have a luxo yacht in the 100' range and hire a rockstar crew and live on it with the goal of renting it out to rich folks who want a getaway mini-cruise. A floating Ritz Carlton with top chefs and entertainment.
Fun fact about shipwrecks, by the way: The swimming pool on the Titanic is still full of water.
In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :
It's fairly common for the uber-rich and not-so-rich to rent their boats out when they aren't using them. Crew included.
Costs range wildly from $200 a night to sleep at the dock to $8000 a night for an 82' with all the toys.
VRBO lists a pile of them.
Edit to add: That's some damn cold water to be putting in a pool.
An update video- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-8y4Gk9WqQ&ab_channel=AuroraRestorationProject
This is mostly about repairing the railing- both the wood and metal. And watching them work, what immediately comes to mind is tools.
Like when he's using a small air chisel to get the rust off. Clearly effective. And effective enough to scale that up as much as possible- like a small jack hammer with a bigger blade on it, and maybe a second one with the scale removing attachment. Heck, maybe even a pair of electric ones. It would speed up the process of cleaning up the surfaces a lot- with more tool area.
And when you watch the railing repair... there seems to be a lot of rooms on that deck that would work as a temporary shop, where you could install some good wood tools that would do a better job than hand tools. Like a decent drill press with a long table to put items. And a drum sander that is set up as a planar- where you can make sure that the end result thickness of each restored piece is the same size. The ideas they are doing for repair seem solid- I'm just thinking that they scale up the tools to make the work a lot easier.
Heck, even a small metal shop room on that level would speed things up. Maybe even pre-fabricate sections of the railing so that it's easier to assemble.
Bigger and better tools will make the physical effort to do that work a lot easier- which 1) will speed up the work, and 2) reduce the toll on each of the workers. Right?
In reply to alfadriver :
When I look at a small business, I tend to break them into growth enterprises or lifestyle companies.
The growth model wants to do the stuff you mention, economy of scale and leveraged investment and growth aspirations. The lifestyle company is an owner that likes the niche and is making enough to keep him and his fed and housed.
Pretty sure this is a lifestyle company and not a thing wrong with that.
A ship that size requires at least $100k-$300k a year just to maintain, if not more. And that's assuming the restoration is done. With oceangoing sailboats the rule of thumb is 10% of the boats value in maintenance every year.
As someone who lived on a sailboat in the Caribbean, I know how cruel saltwater can be.
In reply to NOHOME :
I agree.
I spent years hosting work camps of volunteers in foreign countries. Many of the people who volunteered in those work camps were engineers.
They were exceptionally good at coming up with labor saving ideas. Most of which utilized machinery and equipment of some kind. The most difficult concept many of them seemed to have a hard time with was understanding that LABOR was a locally available resource, and contributing labor to the project was the only way some of the local homeowners could contribute. Saving labor actually meant bringing in someone from out of the area to provide a service and paying them with money they didn't have, and it also meant disenfranchising the homeowner participants from participating in the project.
So we used a LOT of labor. We pounded sand mix into molds to make our own blocks, hand mixed thousands of yards of concrete on the ground with shovels, carried it to the roofs manually in buckets. We dug footings by hand, planed wood with manual hand planes, made our own cement roof tiles, felled our own trees and milled them into lumber, and built our own window and door frames by hand.
It absolutely drove my engineer friends who were visiting from the US and Canada bonkers.
Saving labor is not always a good thing.
(Although Alfa is right- this project deserves some level of machining quality and production that would make sense with better equipment)
In reply to NOHOME :
I get where you are going, but I'm looking at the basics- not huge increases of an infrastructure. Like a table top drill press with some kind of table adaptor would be better than a hand held drill. More accurate, more consistent, and no wear and tear on an arm due to the drill grabbing.
Or a much larger air hammer- so that the user can stand up using a much wider blade on the bit. So that the user can just stand up.
There's SO MUCH work for the gutter and rails that using the basic tools will be a huge problem with human labor. They are going to try to restore probably hundreds of wood railings, so personal wear and tear is a big deal.
Injuries can quickly stop a small project, let a lone a massive one like this.
As for the "shop" ideas- again, they have indoor rooms that they can use and stay out of the weather. If you can't do rail work because of cold/hot/rain, well... The other part of that- you can do more at once. Like take 10 rail sections, take them all apart, and do the repeated work on all of them at the same time. Set up time to drill out and replace the plugs will go much faster, or re-finishing the outside....
So I'm more leaning toward using what they have more efficiently.
Another channel with an engine room walkthrough.
and more backstory with some archival photos.
and even more info
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