More bulkheads, mast step doublers and centerboard stuff

I'm gradually working my way backwards in a reasonably methodical way.

The next logical step after bulkhead 3 was to do bulkhead 4. I deviated from plan again, making it from a single piece of 9mm ply that goes the full width of the boat. I wanted the area around the front of the centerboard case and back of the mast step as strong as possible. To do that I knocked up a couple of doublers for either side of the spine between bulkheads 3 and 4, and added tabs to the front of them that pass through bulkhead 4 and into the front of the centerboard case. This will stop the centerboard case pivoting with respect to the mast step.

Here's the detail of the join. It holds together nicely even without epoxy. I'm hoping once it's epoxied and filleted it'll be nice and strong. I'm thinking perhaps adding some unidirectional carbon tape along bulkhead 4 once things are together could also be helpful, as bulkhead 4 transfers loads from the shrouds to the centerboard and mast step, so we want it to be as stiff and strong as possible.

Bulkhead 5 is almost to plan. The only deviation is to make the side seat 20mm taller and 20mm less wide. That gives a bit more space for centerboard case stuff, and reducing the width of the seat gives me a touch more room in the cockpit - think putting a sleeping bag on the floor and sleeping in the boat. I'm thinking I might make a removable slat floor to facilitate this without getting soggy, but that's a long way down the track. Incidentally my 12.7mm trim bit makes short work of duplicating pieces - just make one then run round it to make another. Alas bulkhead 5 can't support itself until I do the floor, so for now it's just neatly packed away.

I also made the arms for bulkhead 3, again using the trim bit to duplicate. This led me to find my first stuff-up. I'd got the measurements wrong on bulkhead 3, so one vertex was out by a good 5mm. After vacillating for a little while, I just cut a new piece from 6mm ply. Took less time to actually do the work than umming and ahhing about what I was going to do. I'm sure I'll be able to recycle the old piece into other things.

I cut the side pieces for the centerboard case from 6mm ply. The rest of the centerboard case will be made from "Tasmanisn oak", which I'm told is neither Tasmanian nor oak. Indeed I believe it's also known as Victorian alpine ash, which is Victorian but isn't ash, being a eucalyptus. Anyway, it's a good middle-of-the road hardwood. reasonably strong and durable, but without the weight of jarrah, and with nice straight grain. It's readily available locally in lengths to 3m. I'm thinking this will be my go-to hardwood for the boat. I'll use it for stringers, keel plank, keelson, etc.

So here's what the spine is looking like now, assembled as best I can without actually gluing anything together (I'm waiting on my first shipment of epoxy - what is it with boat supply places taking forever to fill orders?). The astute can see my first go at bulkhead 3 leaning against the wall in the background, and the rapidly growing pile of offcuts.

Last job for the weekend is to laminate the timber for the centerboard itself. I'm using western red cedar for the majority of the centerboard, with the leading edge made from jarrah. I'm told they used jarrah for the young endeavour, which is plenty strong. In any case it's the toughest timber I know of, and I'm sure it'll help protect the centerboard from dings when I run it into rocks etc. The western red cedar is incredibly light, I'm hoping it'll be reasonably easy to shape. Once it's shaped I plan to sheath the whole thing in unidirectional carbon to give it stiffness, strength, and impact resistance.

So after two weekends and a few evening's work, I reckon I'm up to 30 hours.

Starting on bulkheads

Our cat Mogget is fascinated by the whole woodworking gig. He likes to be involved as much as possible, except when I turn the vacuum cleaner on. He gets quite enthusiastic at times, to the point of rolling in the wood shavings.

Here he is supervising cutting of some of the lightening holes in the spine. I'm using a circle jig on my router to do this, as it's of a size where that's doable.

I built the 6mm bits of bulkheads 1, 2, and 3, and slotted them into place on the spine. Here's bulkheads 1 and 2 on the spine. You can also see my lovely little home-brew speakers in the background, playing lots of really crappy eighties music:

Then I went to work on doublers. John's plan is very economical with plywood. The doublers are all made from multiple pieces, so you can make use of offcuts wherever possible. I decided that was fiddly, so I'm wasting plywood with impunity. Hence the doubler on bulkhead 1. The process I've settled on is to cut everything oversize by about 4-5mm with the jigsaw, then use the router to finish the cut. When it's a straight line I can use some timber to cut against. Ditto when it's a circle of appropriate size for my circle jig. Often it isn't though, so I just work these bits by hand with the router.

I'm not sure Mogget agrees with my wastage of ply.

Here's a close up of bulkhead 2 with it's doubler on top. The bulkhead itself is 6mm ply, the doubler is 9mm. The doubler is quite light.

It certainly becomes three dimensional quickly.

And one quick view of the model, this time showing the whole lot so far:

The spine

On Wednesday I decided there was no way I could afford to do this (at least in a decent time scale) if I had to pay for freight for ply. So we borrowed a trailer and went to Bunnings, and bought four sheets - two of 9mm and two of 6mm. I have no idea what their ply is made from, except that it's stamped "BS1088" and had a brochure talking about sustainable forestry. On close inspection it looks pretty good. The face sheets are clear and I couldn't see any voide around the periphery of the sheets. It'll do. While we were there I picked up a pile of western red cedar planks that I'll laminate to make the centerboard.

So once I got home, I cleared the bikes and car from the garage, got Perry's help to put a 9mm sheet on the bench, and marked out the spine on it. Then I cut that out with a jigsaw, and repeated the exercise twice to make doublers for the front section. Then I clamped the three bits of ply together and worked them with my trim router (think tiny cuts) and sandpaper in a block until I was happy with the curves, and all three pieces matched nicely.

Here's what I'm trying to make, from my model. The spine is a good spot to start, because it's a manageable size, but a fair bit of the boat (bulkheads 1 through 3) hangs off it, so I can construct a largish subassembly that then gets attached to the rest of the boat before having to permanently banish the car from the garage:

Here's a pic just before picking up the jigsaw:

And here's the result of about four hour's work. I still have to cut the holes in the back of the spine, and slot it to accept bulkhead 3:

As I work I come up with things that I'm missing. The top two items at the moment are a decent plane and a spokeshave. It's very nice to actually be making things though.

Oh, and I've come up with a name for my boat. It'll be Elena.

So is this boatbuilding step zero?

My workshop gear has become a little specialised of late (which means in the last decade) around metalwork. Not that that's such a bad thing. I've got some lovely metalwork tools that work quite well, chiefly being my 125mm English Record vise. All this metalwork has an effect on one's workbench though. It makes it, well, grotty. It's all the metal filings etc. Here's a loving closeup that I took a couple of years ago, with some pretty lugs on it.

When I built my bench, I was on a very strict budget, so for a top I simply bought a couple of bits of 16mm MDF, and bolted them to a pine frame, braced with ply across the back and down the sides. I've "refreshed" the top sheet of MDF once already, after the old one got just too grotty. Given that I'll be shifting modes a little for the next while, I thought a new refresh was in order. This time I didn't want a crappy bit of MDF though, I wanted something more permanent.

After umming and ahhing quite a bit, I decided the only really permanent benchtop material is Jarrah. This stuff is like the stainless steel of timber. Dense, close grained, very hard on tools, and really incredibly durable. Unlike MDF. I bought five 125mm wide, 30mm thick, 2400mm long planks and laminated them together, then trimmed the ends to give me a 2200 x 625 x 30 benchtop surface. I spent the best part of a day planing the top as flat as I could get it (whoa, upper body work!), then finished it with lots of carnauba wax.

Here it is, set up with my metalworking vise.

I'm thinking that I'll be working quite a bit with large sheets of ply. These are 2400 x 1200. To support the inevitable stuff that overhangs the bench, I built a matching sawhorse. A simple 1200 x 80 x 30 jarrah top, with legs made from pine, and some Jarrah offcuts as reinforcing at the top. It's made the same height as the bench. Note also that the metalwork vise stows underneath when not in use.

When the sawhorse isn't being used, the legs spin around so it stores flat. There's a gap down the back of the bench where I can stow it to provide a home for spiders.

Of course I've been doing more design work too. The boat plans are in a good state. Latest agonising is about oars. I'm toying with the idea of building bendy ones, so they stow better. I've also been making good use of Sketchup's follow me tool to draw rigging:

Next step is to buy timber. Alas here in Geraldton the only source of "marine ply" is Bunnings, and it's of somewhat questionable quality. I'm pretty-much resigned to ordering all my timber from Perth, so in order not to go broke with freight costs, I'm saving my pennies to buy pretty-much all of it at once.

The inevitable conclusion when you're drawn to water.

One of the nicest parts about living in Geraldton is the easy proximity to the Indian ocean. The beach is about a hundred metres walk, easily done in togs and thongs. There's a boat ramp maybe 300m away. When I put my toggs on, my cat starts meowing, as he knows that I'll bring home half a dozen pippis from the beach.

Years ago when riding in Sydney, my daughter commented that I was "drawn to water". Part of that is because all the good rides; Brooklyn, Akuna, Bobbo, McCarrs Creek etc involve riding past marinas, but the truth is she's right. I really love the water. Since we've been over here I've been closer than at any point in my life to the ocean, but unlike Sydney where I could blag a sail on a friend's yacht at short notice, here not so much.

So the inevitable conclusion from this conjunction: Build a boat. How could I not have seen it sooner.

Perry and I started the process by measuring the garage. 5.5m long. It's really gotta fit in there, at least while we're building it. That puts some constraints on the project straight away. Next, it's gotta be trailerable, as there are no moorings near here and marina berths are way too spendy for us. Gotta be quite easy to sail, as I'm a bit of a novice sailer, and have to admit I've never actually captained a boat. Neither has Perry.

Perry's really keen on rowing, and I'm really averse to noisy, smelly, unreliable outboards. That means rowability is important. Not for the main means of propulsion, but more as an auxiliary function, to get us on and off the trailer, as backup in case the wind isn't blowing, etc.

It's gotta be plenty seaworthy, as there are no sheltered lakes or harbours here. Sailing means the ocean. Admittedly there are plenty of offshore reefs to keep the swell down, but there's also the Geraldton Southerlies to contend with. They don't call this "the shipwreck coast" for nothing. Actually, they call WA the shipwreck coast because early sailors had no reliable way to reckon their longitude, so ran into it rather more than they would have liked. Oh, and did I mention reefs. We'd also like enough room to overnight on, so we're getting pretty specific.

So after some mucking about, searching the web, and harassing people, I found the John Welsford Navigator. This is a lovely little 4.5m partly decked dinghy, with a whopping 1.8m beam. Most Navigators are rigged as a yawl, with a titchy main and a little mizzen up the back, but there's an option for a real sloop too.

A couple of quick emails had the plans winging their way to me, and I set to work.

Now nothing is perfect, and even before I'd ordered the plans I had a bit of a list of optimisations that I wanted to do to customise the design to our specific needs. Most of them revolve around the centerboard. The Navigator's centerboard is relatively short, with plenty of chord. This means you're less likely to smack it into the bottom of lakes and rivers, but means the case sticks up a very long way into the boat. Much higher than the seat level, some 15cm higher in fact. This has profound implications on rowability. I'm told you can just sit on the centerboard case and have at it, but I'm not terribly short and can see myself smacking my head on the boom rather a lot. Also, long slender centerboards are allegedly more efficient, have more righting moment (especially if you cast the tip in lead), and just look cooler. Not that boats with short centerboards can't be pretty though. Here's a particularly pretty example, Arwen:

There's a limit though. They have to be strong enough to cope with the idiot who just capsized the boat standing on the end to right it. Nothing a bit of unidirectional carbon fibre can't improve though...

Rather than building the boat and trying to figure all the changes out as I went along, I thought it prudent to make a model first. Most people make cute little 1:10 odd models in wood. Not me. I went the digital route. I'm a tight-arse though, so I did it in free software (Google sketchup). The process is actually pretty straightforward. Draw the bulkheads in 2D, extrude them to their thickness. Draw the keel plank and position the bulkheads along it. Then draw fair curves where the stringers go, and start filling in the gaps.

Drawing fair curves in Sketchup is fiddly, as it has no spline tool, but with patience (I erased everything and started from scratch twice) you can get a pretty good approximation of a hull. Systematic use of curves is the key, remembering that every curve has 12 line segments, and that you can get curves to launch smoothly off the end of other curves.

And what curves! There's not a straight line in sight.

Then just add detail, add detail, add detail, until you go a little nuts. I let the full force of my considerable OCD loose on the problem, and as a result I've got a reasonably good model that I can work with. The hull shape, planking and bulkhead position is exactly as Welsford intended. I've made some detail changes to bulkheads 4 and aft, and obviously designed the centerboard and case pretty-much from scratch. It's resulted in a seat position 20mm above Welsford's design. It's still a work in progress. I'm currently missing the rudder, tiller, bowsprit, coaming, foresail, and stupendous amounts of rigging. It's got all those sexy boat shapes though.

To give some more space in the cockpit (insert dreams of dropping seal, chucking the sea anchor overboard and climbing into my sleeping bag on the floor during a passage) I deleted the aft thwart (what use is a thwart there anyway when the tiller goes straight across it?). I narrowed the cockpit seats by 20mm, and narrowed the center (now rowing) thwart from about 600mm to just 300mm. My centerboard has a 300mm chord and 1000mm length, and is about 40mm thick at the root, tapering to about 25mm at the tip. Should be a hoot to make. Importantly though the centerboard case is now level with the top of the rowing thwart, which should improve rowability immeasurably.

Incidentally I'm not the only one to think of centerboard mods. Dauntless also has a longer centerboard with less chord, not so much for rowability as for more (or is that moar?) speed. That's one sexy boat, and the only one I've seen so far with a proper sloop rig.

I spent some time carefully modelling the up-haul, so I could be sure there was enough space between the mast and centerboard uphaul linkage for blocks. To simplify things a little I've buried one of the blocks inside the centerboard itself at the pivot. This arrangement gives me a straightforward 3:1 purchase. I've located the cleat on top of the case, forward of the rowing thwart so you don't sit on it. You can see it in the drawing, with the cat peering intently at it.

So there's where I'm up to as of today. As finances allow, we'll be buying huge quantities of marine plywood, hoop pine, epoxy, fiberglass, carbon, then mast, boom, sails, rigging, safety gear...

Building again - a Genius racebike

I've been doing a reasonable amount of riding lately - between 150 and 250 km per week, and have joined the local bike racing club. I'm currently riding two bikes; my Audax bike, which I built a number of years ago from Columbus Zona tubing with Henry James lugs, and a really super-crappy Avanti 29er mountain bike that I ride when I'm out at work (the nearest paved road to where I work is about 200km away). Anyway, most of my kilometers are on the Audax bike, with nice relaxed geometry, 42cm chainstays, and downtube shifters. I've updated that a little, swapping all the '99-'03 Chorus parts out for NOS equivalent Record stuff. It looks great and rides pretty nicely.

I also built some new lightweight wheels, as my Nisi rims were starting to pull through on the spoke holes. I went for Ambrosio Crono rims, with 28 DT rev spokes per wheel (DT comps on the rear drive side) and my '06 odd Record hubs. Surprisingly I found my used Record hubs are worth much more than I bought them for new - Campy no longer make them and they're much sought after, especially in the 28 spoke drilling. The new wheels are a delight, shod with Veloflex Criterium singles.

The Audax bike, though very nice and comfy, and reasonably quick, isn't a race bike. It's maybe half a kilo heavier than it could be and a tad relaxed. Good for long rides (even long road races), and just the ticket for training rides, but a bit lazy for crits. I confess the DT levers are something of a handicap too - watching others change gears in the sprint makes me want ergos again. I figured it was about time I got to building again, so I dug out my set of Genius tubes and started. The plan for a road bike has been around for a little while, my only change is to make it perhaps a little more aggressive than I might once have. As mentioned, it's using Genius OS tubes, the lightest tubes I know of, and Henry James plain steel lugs. I've shortened the top tube by 5mm from that of my Audax bike, and shortened the seat tube by 10mm. The chainstays have come in a whopping 20mm. I've upped the seat tube angle to 74 degrees, but stuck with a 72.5 degree head tube angle. The result should move the seat forward a centimeter or so, and the bars down by a similar amount, making for a more aggressive position, just right for short races.

Genius has a reputation for being noodly, so I've done what I can to mitigate that. First I've shortened the chainstays as much as possible, to just 40cm. I've substituted True Temper OX Platinum chainstays, in a 28 x 20 size rather than the more usual 30 x 16 Columbus stays. My hope is that the shorter, wider stays will provide better lateral stiffness. I'll also add a 22mm dia chainstay bridge, in much the same way I did for Keith's bike. The compromise is in tyre size. I'm not really going to be able to get much more than a 25mm tyre between the stays, and forget fenders. Fair enough, it is after all a race bike. We'll see how ridable it is...

Anyway, here's a diagram of the geometry. Note the orientation of the top and down tubes. Genius has very short assymetrical butts, which must be carefully lined up when mitering. The tubes are 0.4mm thick, with 0.7mm ends, so it should be nice and light:

Here's where I'm up to now - I've mitred the main tubes and laid it out on the jig. Next step is to disassemble, then add all the brazeons before putting the tubes back in the jig for brazing the main triangle:

Alas the place where I'm living isn't really amenable to brazing, so my plan is to take the bits out to the accommodation at my work (a big cattle station), and do the messy brazing out there in a shed in my time off.

I've also started collecting bits for the build - NOS Record 10 speed groupset with carbon ultratorque cranks, Columbus minimal carbon fork, 3T carbon seatpost and carbon deep drop bars. Should go quite nicely, and hopefully weigh under 8kg.

Stackhat - the iconic brand that helped kill an industry

The eighties were an exciting time to be growing up here in Australia. The music was fantastic, the country was riding high on the sheep's back (seriously, the price of wool was astronomical), and all was well with the world. We'd even just robbed the yanks of the coveted Americas cup.

At the time, the Australian cycling industry was going gangbusters. We had a veritable plethora of local bike brands; from the cheap and cheerful Repco and Cyclops, through Apollo, Speedwell, Bennett, and Malvern Star. The custom and small-batch market was well catered to as well, with Abeni, Bundy, Graecross, Ricardo, Super Elliott to name just the big ones.

Enter a fledgeling plastic molding business in Melbourne, Rosebank plastics. They were in business making all manner of plastic injection molded products for other companies; buckets, automotive products etc., and the founders were looking for a product that they could both make and market themselves. Commonwealth Industrial Gases (CIG) had toyed with the idea of a "sports helmet" for cricketers, skateboarders, horse riders and bike riders, but the molds were unfinished - CIG didn't have much interest in the product. Rosebank saw the opportunity and bought the molds, coming up with the Stackhat helmet.

Importantly, the Stackhat wasn't developed by cyclists. It was developed by a maker of industrial gas and workshop safety gear. CIG's main products (apart from gas bottles) were and are welding gear, facemasks, dust masks and the like. They incorporated some token "cooling slots" in the mold, but nothing substantial. What was substantial was the weight. These puppies had a thick ABS shell, an inch or so of dense polystyrene, and an inner cloth liner. You could bounce one on a concrete floor all day long without fear of damaging it.

Rosebank marketed their new helmet enthusiastically. Before long, they were on the shelves in many bike shops and department stores across the country. Non-cycling parents loved them for much the same reason the non-cyclist designers did. They could take all the abuse a kid could possibly dish out and come back begging for more. They were also relatively inexpensive.

There was just one teensy problem. Us kids really hated them. And with good reason. Most of Australia gets pretty hot in summer, and trying to exercise with a kilogram of esky strapped to your head is, well, not a lot of fun. So we tended to forget our Stackhats, or else lose them. Indeed pretty soon the Stackhat become the shining emblem of the dorky kid who always did exactly as he was told by his parents. Not only were they seriously awful to wear, but being seen in one was tantamount to social suicide.

Not that all us kids were totally against helmets. I really wanted a proper Rogelli or Cinelli one, so I could pretend I was Hinault or Zoetemelk, and my ride to school was Liege-Bastogne-Liege. But then I was a pretty weird kid. Now that I think of it I'm a weird adult, too.

The mid to late eighties were a bit of a battleground with the helmet manufacturers, trauma surgeons, public safety experts, statisticians and bloody dogooders all clambering over one another trying to scare us away from cycling. It seems that almost overnight, cycling went from being quite benign and enjoyable to incredibly lethal. You were taking your life into your own hands just going for a pootle down the shops. Like all good marketing campaigns, the target wasn't the kids, it was their mums. How dare you allow your kid out the door without their Stackhat! This Bell ad, though from the US, is typical of the crap we had to put up with:

Along about the same time, there was a new and exciting movement in cycling, specifically targeting us layabout youths. BMX. I myself never got into BMX (I confess it wasn't nearly Italian enough for me), but all of my friends had one. Every single one. I had to search in the bike shed at school through bloody Kuwaharas and Redlines six deep to find my trusty Peugeot. The BMX movement brought with it a certain disdain for authority, exemplified by Nicole Kidman's only half-way decent performance in BMX bandits. Frankly, we ran amok.

So they kept trying to force these helmets on us, and we kept ignoring them. Soon enough, they started getting in the politician's ears. Rosebank were particularly insidious. Not only did they go to work on the Victorian government, they also got in the ear of Standards Australia, making sure that the new Australian Standard for bicycle helmets, which was being developed ahead of compulsory helmet legislation, would favour them over other manufacturers. Key to this was the "resistance to penetration" test, which the lightweight well ventilated fabric covered polystyrene helmets of the time failed, but of course the Stackhat passed. Note of course there was no maximum weight test, nor ventilation test. The standards, like the helmets, were developed by a committee of bureaucrats, not cyclists.

Even the bike shops were complicit. They did the maths. Five million cyclists times $80 per helmet equals a hell of a lot of profit. Standards Australia had done a very good job of stitching the market up, so there was zero overseas competition. Even though there were perfectly good overseas standards that could be used, like Snell and BSA, these weren't going to be allowed on our precious Australian heads. Markups could be stratospheric, and they were and still are.

So '89 comes, and the helmet laws start coming into effect. For many of the adult cyclists this wasn't such a problem. A lot of them already wore helmets (after all the marketing campaigns of the last ten years were all aimed squarely at them) and didn't see it as such a problem. They also had the money to get themselves half-way decent ones. For us teenagers though it was devastating. There was simply no way we were going to stick a bucket on our heads to go to school. Even if we did, what the hell were we going to do with the damn thing when we got there? Making matters worse, it was all-but-impossible to convince mum of the utility of any helmet beyond the POS Stackhat, as she simply had no idea.

To add insult to injury, the police went to town, creating cycling units to patrol the local shops and handing out $40 fines left, right and center. I sometimes wonder what was in the minds of the politicians of the time who voted in those laws. Was it truly a misguided effort to protect us, or was there some element of wanting to get rid of the kids down the local shops, playing video games and riding too fast on their BMX bikes?

Sure enough most of us stopped riding. The bureaucrats declared victory, as the percentage of helmet wearing cyclists doubled overnight. What they conveniently forgot to mention was that the actual number of cyclists (especially teenaged cyclists) halved. Good one.

All the bike shops did terribly well for a couple of years, and then many started closing. People spent their first paychecks on cars, not high-end bikes. Most of those Australian bike brands from my childhood are gone now. Sure, most of the blame goes to globalisation and the rise of companies like Giant, but how much blame goes to our rather peculiar helmet laws? Other comparable countries (I'm thinking the US) had a bike boom that started in the late eighties, with Bontrager, Klein, Cannondale, Trek, etc. becoming huge. Australia, not so much. Even the Kiwis have Avanti.

Ironically the bike boom of the nineties that created all those new US manufacturers was mountain bikes. Oversized BMX bikes with gears for cashed up twenty-somethings.

My enduring memory of Rosebank's Stackhat is from 1986. I was a mad keen road cyclist, riding my crappy Avanti water-pipe roadie sans-helmet on the great Victorian bike ride, somewhere around Sale. It was bloody hot, and the day was long. I came across a younger kid who was being bundled into the back of an ambulance. Word going round was that she'd fainted and fallen off her bike, suffering heat exhaustion. Sitting on the ground next to her bike was her helmet, a Stackhat.

Doodling

I've been working most weeks in the middle of nowhere, spending the evening in a little room with no TV, no sealed roads to ride on, no torch...

So I've taken to drawing bikes instead of riding them. Here's a couple of my more lighthearted drawings. Firstly, mooching along on the flat being the lazy cyclist. In my twenties I had a permanently sunburned midriff from spending too much time on the bike in crop tops. What can I say, it was the nineties:

And secondly, descending. Those who ride with me generally claim I descend like a maniac. I figure there's no point making the climb if you're not going to give it your all on the way down too:

The observant will note I don't much care for helmets, and that I'm a fan of downtube shifters. The observant would be correct.

Little fish has moved!

We've just moved house, and no little across-town move, either. We've gone from Sydney to Geraldton - on opposite sides of the country. The reason for this is that my job has moved to Geraldton, working on a new radiotelescope there. I actually get paid to work on radiotelescopes - yes, be jealous. Not only do they pay me a good wage, they also kindly offered to pay for the move, so all of our belongings were packed up and put into a shipping container - minus a few select bits.

First is my LPG bottle, oxygen cylinder and fire extinguisher. The removalists won't take gas canisters, so none of them made the cut. Same with much of my paint (no flammables and no aerosols). Oh well.

So the neat thing about Geraldton is that, unlike Sydney, housing is actually pretty affordable (sure, house prices have doubled there in the last few years, but that's starting from a really low base). So we're likely to end up in a nice little place on a couple of acres quite soon, complete with chooks, a dog to keep them in line, and (this is the really cool bit) a shed.

Yeah, I'm gonna have my own shed. How cool is that. Somewhere where I can set up the frame building stuff permanently, and tool up properly. With a proper spray booth, and a proper pedestal mounted vise, and grinder, and maybe even my own lathe and mill.

In the meantime, we'll spend a year or so in a comfy rental place while we find the perfect shed house.

We started our trip by buying up big on camping gear. I camp pretty regularly, but it's cut-down toothbrush camping. My tiny tent isn't really suited to both Perry and me. Perry isn't a camper, so I went with pretty big car-camping kit. A tent we can stand up in, big thick sleeping mats. Even a fold-up table.

I bought a rack to put some of the stuff on the roof, along with my favorite bicycle, and we filled the car with stuff, including our fish in two 20 litre buckets.

Here's a photo of the car on our very first day, packed to the gunnels and ready to go:

I'm the only driver in the family, so we took it pretty easy on our trip, with heaps of breaks and relatively short days. The first day was a quite short one, on account of supervising removalists in the morning, from Sydney to Canberra, where we hooked up with family. Next day we drove across to Hay, in south-west NSW. We stayed in a little caravan park in Hay, but in a pre-booked cabin. It was rather nice.

So on day three we did the drive across to Adelaide, where we stayed for two nights, catching up with one of Perry's friends and looking around the city. Our accommodation in Adelaide was pretty ritzy - a cabin with its own bathroom and everything, and just a stone's throw from the beach to boot.

Day five had us drive to Ceduna, where we pitched our tent for the very first time at a caravan park. Perry did pretty well on his first night of "doing it rough", but didn't like sleeping in a sleeping bag (my bags are down, and really too hot and snug for the conditions). I offered some advice for getting more comfy, by opening up his bag and using it as a blanket. Me, I like to be snug. Of course we had to take a photo at Kimba - allegedly half way across.

Day six was the Nullarbor. A distance of some 500km and stopping in Eucla, a few kilometres into WA. Unfortunately there aren't really any other options - the next town (Norseman) is a further 700km. The drive was almost surreal. The towns get further and further apart, and there is just nothing in between. We stopped a couple of times to look out over the great Australian bight. They need a picture of the water off the bight for the dictionary entry of 'azure'.

So at Eucla, we paid for a campsite and went to pitch our tent. turns out the ground is compacted gravel, the consistency of concrete. After bending a peg we gave up and paid for the world's most dire room. Put it this way, I slept in my sleeping bag, for fear of bedbugs in the bed. And the shower only worked once I put a $1 coin in, after which it cut out while I still had conditioner in my hair. Aargh! Oh, and diesel here is 50c/litre more expensive than in Ceduna.

We wandered out to look at Eucla's one tourist attraction - the ruins of a building down near the shore. Apparently it used to be a telegraph station, but shifting sand dunes half buried it so they moved the town a couple of kilometers further inland as a result. Very post-apocalyptic.

Oh well, it was character building. It made us rethink the rest of the journey though. We were originally going to stop in Norseman (another town with a dodgy reputation) and then head to Perth via Kalgoorlie, but instead drove straight through to Esperance, to get out of the desert.

Esperance was just divine. So much so that we stayed there a couple of days to recalibrate. Here's Perry reading the paper post-dead-tree, having adapted very well to living in a tent:

Our final stop before Geraldton was in Bunbury, where Apple maps lied to us about the location of the caravan park :)

So now we're in our lovely new home, with plenty of space for all our stuff, great 4G internet reception (who needs a fixed phone with a $300 connection fee when you get 9mbps on 4g). We've even got ducted airconditioning and really good insulation to get us through the hot Geraldton summers. And as a bonus, the beach is just 150m away.

Alas my garage is not properly unpacked yet - I really need to buy some shelving and cupboards to organise all my stuff. It'll be a little while before I'm back to building frames.

Paypal and ebay (or why I'm currently chewing my own leg off)

Apparently I’m a money launderer. Or a thief. Or an ebay scammer. Paypal aren’t sure which, but as long as they’re able to keep my money they’re happy to run through the list.

It all started because we're moving house. Yay for us! Even better, we're moving due to a shiny new job I got to Geraldton WA - clear across the other side of the country to a place where we can actually (gasp) afford to buy a house. What's that you say? A member of gen-X owning property? Yes! Cop that, boomers!

Anyway, that's not what I'm ranting about. Before the move proper (which is even paid for by my employer - how good is that?), I thought I'd clear some of the clutter around the house. I made a little pile; of motorcycle parts, camera bits, and even a bed from our spare room, took photos, and chucked the lot on ebay. Given that it's all basically junk that would have gone to the tip otherwise (except for the bed, which had some value) I stuck $0.99 start prices on everything to make sure it, well, actually sold.

Thirteen items in all. Good stuff. Ebay had helpfully pre-filled many of the fields in for the sales listing for me, making the job of putting stuff on easier. A couple of days later, everything was listed.

Only there was one small, teeny problem, which I didn't notice until people started paying for the stuff. It had somehow picked up my work email address for the paypal section. Annoying. Oh well, it's only the first item of thirteen. I can just fix the other twelve up, and then worry about the first one later.

Nope. It'll let me revise all sorts of things on the listings, but refuses to let me correct the paypal email address. After some thought, I figured I'd just go with the flow and create a new paypal account using the correct email address, then once the debacle is done with, kill it off. After some frustration while it refuses to link my bank account to the new paypal (apparently it's already linked to my normal paypal account - who'd have thought!), I manage to get it going.

So now the ebay annoyances start. I'd put local pickup on things, because it always costs a small fortune to post stuff, and it's a pain trying to find boxes and packaging. Not to mention that some of it is bloody heavy (like the bed and my 9kg motorcycle forks). Those I put up for strictly local pickup, and made sure that the listing said that, both in the listing itself and in the postage options.

Sure enough, someone from Melbourne buys the forks anyway, and sends me a request for an invoice, with a little note on it that says "I checked on the Australia post website, and it says they're acceptable". Not to worry, thinks I, I'll just cancel the transaction and offer to the second bidder (with a discount).

Nuh uh! Ebay won't let me do that without permission from the buyer. He of course declines the cancel request, and I'm left having to find packaging for the bloody forks, pack them, and lug them down to the post office. Not only that, I'd also offered them to the second bidder, and now get to look like an idiot. I put an extra $10 handling charge on the invoice for our hero in Melbourne just to let him know I wasn't happy.

Okay, so after a couple of days everything's packed up and shipped (only the bed went to a local pickup, and they even paid with paypal). At the cost of $128. This is funded out of my pocket, because every single buyer paid with paypal. My paypal balance says $1040, which is pretty cool.

So then the real fun starts. I eye a towbar for the car on ebay - local pickup (he's in Sydney, I'm in Sydney, all is good). It'd be a useful thing to have, I could even get a bike trailer and tow my motorbike with my car. I buy it for the offered $750, and pay with paypal. It's kosher, the buyer of my bed did the same. Paypal however don't like this. They're the taker of money, not the provider. They freeze my account and send me a nasty email.

So now, after reading through copious quantities of guff, where they say there's a problem but don't say what it is, I think they might want invoices. For the crap around my house. Do you have invoices for the crap around your house? Or is it because I'm an ebay scammer (but apparently all the twits sending me messages trying to get me to end auctions and sell stuff to them for a pittance aren't). Or was it money laundering?

More likely they're just offended that I might try to actually make use of the money in my account, which I had mistakenly thought might, well, be my money.

So now I've graciously mailed off a pile of my stuff to people all around the world, at a cost of some $128 and maybe five hours work. And what do I have to show for it? Nothing. Thanks guys! Next time I'll just take it to the tip. The tip fees can't possibly be that bad.

And for the poor guy who thinks I've bought his towbar? All I can do is apologise.