🐮 Lolcow Doug Jackson / SV Seeker - Boomer hubris personified, an incompetent lunatic's dreams slowly crumbling to dust because of his own poor decisions.

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What? Do you expect Doug to have a plain old prop on a shaft leading up to the motor like some kind of pleb? Next you’ll start talking about bow thrusters and other nonsense!

I’m hoping for some updates soon, I can’t wait to see what they have to fix next.
 
TurboNAS said:
What? Do you expect Doug to have a plain old prop on a shaft leading up to the motor like some kind of pleb? Next you’ll start talking about bow thrusters and other nonsense!
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What kind of noob doesn't have a retractable azimuth thruster?
 
TurdFondler said:
I can't believe he didn't test the pitch controller beforehand. To expect a DIY repair like that to just work first try is so completely ignorant. Any sane person would have made a test platform.
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Since when is sanity a prerequisite to lolcowdom?

I think the beer and entitled belief that he's a modern innovator from the last generation of real men fucked with his thinking strings.
 
For sure. Just boggles my mind he didn't put the controller on a barge in a lake to iron out the details. Any time and money it would have cost him then he's losing now anyway.
 
Penrowe said:
The pitch control unit was bought from a scrapper, it did not function and had been deactivated, requiring Doug to either spend money on replacement parts (lmao) or monkey about on his lathe to create the parts he needed. What he botched together keeps failing because of the following:
  1. Hundested would not divulge dimensions/tolerances, so Doug had to guess. He guessed wrong.
  2. Doug is incapable of precision work.
The pitch control malfunctions because it cannot hold pressure. This is made worse by Doug casting the biggest damn prop blades he could. A smaller prop would have meant lower pressure and greater likelihood of success.

To clarify, he bought a lathe rather than spend the money on the parts he needed. Doug had no prior machining experience (his work is still piss poor a decade later) and decided to jump into the deep end of the pool while thinking .001" and .001mm are the same thing.
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The prop size is probably one of the major issues as basic physics says that the larger the prop blades the more force the pitch controller has to work against. I worked as a shipyard machinist for a few years and I would bet his other problem is surface finish. Mating surfaces like that tend to have a very small tolerance window and require a highly polished surface finish to allow smooth sliding. Other bet is when he made the new distributor ring he didn’t make it out of the right bronze.
Least Concern said:
Okay, now y'all are just making up slang terms for penises.
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Just you wait till you hear about sheaves cleats and spuds.
So, we must buy a new distributor ring and muff for $3.5 grand, or buy a distributor ring and flame spray some metal back onto the muff and machine it to the proper size $2.5 grand, or we build a new distributor ring and put the money into a good lathe, $3 grand and I end up with a free lathe. Hmmmm.... Guess what Hundested? We got a lathe that will pay for itself with he first part.
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Ah. There’s his problem. Flame spray will never be as good as the original part and is generally not used for high surface finish work.

ETA: I’ve machined cutlass bearings before and they are very picky about tolerancing. You are looking at +/- .0001”
 
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Smoke Manmuscle said:
I’ve machined cutlass bearings before and they are very picky about tolerancing. You are looking at +/- .0001”
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I once had to go through a whole batch of RPMT inserts for Atlas Copco, pulled out 800 or so that were off by a tenth of a micron or less after I discovered we had a bad axis on the grinder. The shift supervisor told me if they weren't our next door neighbors he would've just ok'd them.
 
Smoke Manmuscle said:
Ah. There’s his problem. Flame spray will never be as good as the original part and is generally not used for high surface finish work.
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I doubt he used flame spray to build up the part(I refuse to believe it's called a muff). He only talked about that happening if he bought a new distributor ring and it would have required paying a real machinist. He probably didn't turn down the part to take out ±.0007 surface "finish" he started with.

Doug buying the distributor ring and having a machinist build up the part would have been the most retarded option. He would have been out $3k+, it still wouldn't work right because no known tolerances, and he would eventually ruin the $2.5K part. At least this way he's destroying "free" parts.
 
He could have built a small following on youtube trying to remanufacture that part. It's a huge project in and of itself, and those tolerances are not to be fucked with by a backyard machinist with no experience.

Especially since he doesn't even know what tolerances and sizes he's aiming for.

Anyway, anyone got a link to a write up for the Flyin Hawaiian? I can only find news blurbs and a few pictures. It's hilarious, the floats were square framed like a house with no cross members by the looks of it.
 
My favorite, absolute fucking favorite in the incompetent tech dude space is/was Raptor Aircraft. Another programmer who thinks he can disrupt everything and knows better than anyone else because tech bro.

His sins are myriad. He:
  • Did Tesla-style preorders when it was nothing but a render
  • Ignored every single piece of advice and belittled people giving it, Doug style
    • This reached its peak when one of the people who designed the engine he was using told him, VERY helpfully he was doing the cooling wrong and how to fix it, and he snarked the guy out.
  • The aero was terrible. It had control surface flutter at fast taxi speeds (this should not happen). This led to dampener weights being added which was bad because...
  • The prototype was something like 1200 pounds overweight. It had something like 100lb of useful load out of the box. He flew it in this condition.
  • Because of the Aero and the weight, it could only make like... half its projected top speed, and I think less than half the projected range.
  • Two engine failures because he's a retard.
  • The second engine failure resulted in a forced landing in a cornfield. The aircraft (a big selling point) was eqipped with a whole airframe parachute and the dude pretty much admitted he tried to land it (no-no) wheels down (huge no-no) so he could try to save the airframe. It's still toast, of course.
The whole saga as recorded by the idiot is on Youtube. There are other commenters all over the place. I wish we'd saved the one clip of an aerospace engineer on Twitch talking about it, it was like a three hour hilarious rant.

Naturally his response to this dismal failure was to announce the "Raptor NG" which is going to be the same fucking thing but a battery/diesel hybrid which isn't going to fix the weight issues.
 
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Watching some of you explain what is wrong with this train wreck is what got me interested in boat engineering. This is my favorite thread by far. We need more cows like Doug who actually do things and fuck them up, instead of spending all day on Twitter.
 
watching him do the battens three times, turn the big sail around 180° and then bust his screaming pulleys is agonizing. the minute they start lifting sails everything on the boat is screaming. I had to go back and watch it again, that video

Chinese jank.
 
A challenger approaches!
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"My husband is a ship inspector for The American Bureau of Shipping. Surveyors ARE PRICELESS for sure! Watch for us on the news as we get ready to launch Fall of 2014 our ship the SS Deo Gratis! Husband hand built, hand welded this 70′ solid steel Junk Rig Schooner by himself over the last 30 years!" - PJ Billing
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When it's ready for its missions, PJ said they'll work with humanitarian organization Crisis Response International to figure out where they feel they're needed and with youth sailing foundations to help recruit volunteers.
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No mention of children or family, not a peep about wanting to serve the local community, screw that let's go save the world.
I hate boomers so goddamn much.
 
Penrowe said:
Why use any of those tools though when you can show that Essential Craftsman nerd how a real man uses a circular saw?
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Has anyone seen the mill or other heavy equipment running since he lost shore power? I've been watching the videos where they installed the electrical panels and I can't figure out how the system is supposed to work. From the video he got a professional electrician to do the actual wiring, but then you have this: https://youtu.be/MhCQWRzKjTQ?list=PLM2QJRpjmpfkn_mdpDreLwjFGp1FbXinC&t=1609

Is the DC system grounded to the Hull? Is the AC system grounded to the battery? On smaller boats they use a floating ground, I don't know how well the CNC mill is going to work with those GFCI breakers if they don't have an actual ground reference. If he screws up the electrical on the boat badly enough he could dissolve his hull through electrolysis before he hits salt.
 
Imago said:
Has anyone seen the mill or other heavy equipment running since he lost shore power? I've been watching the videos where they installed the electrical panels and I can't figure out how the system is supposed to work. From the video he got a professional electrician to do the actual wiring, but then you have this: https://youtu.be/MhCQWRzKjTQ?list=PLM2QJRpjmpfkn_mdpDreLwjFGp1FbXinC&t=1609

Is the DC system grounded to the Hull? Is the AC system grounded to the battery? On smaller boats they use a floating ground, I don't know how well the CNC mill is going to work with those GFCI breakers if they don't have an actual ground reference. If he screws up the electrical on the boat badly enough he could dissolve his hull through electrolysis before he hits salt.
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That makes me wonder if he even decided to put sacrificial anodes on the hull.
 
Apparently the Yamaha motor on his dinghy didn’t die, it just doesn’t like a bunch of water in the fuel. Plus some calculations on his fuel reserves (680 gallons between two tanks plus more). He mentions a noticeable list to starboard he’s going to fix by pumping fuel to the port side tank. Just another day solving boat problems (and making more) for Doug.

 

Highlights:
-Doug leaves, and then returns to the boat in a thunderstorm and is surprised it's still there
-The deck leaks like a sieve. The cascade waterfall down the mast was fun, wonder how long it'll take his harbor freight bilge pump to clear it out.
-The drawers in the pilothouse refrigerator aren't latched. At all.
-Doug admits the floating anchor rode may not be the best thing
-Doug drags anchor, wonders if he needs to add more chain
-Rants on gasoline and propane and their relative safety
-Rants on anchoring. "Don't show me a West Marine manual!"
-"Anchoring is a lot like religion. Once you're convinced about something, there's no unconvincing you, so having the conversation is kindof a moot point."
 
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