Colin Peck and waste oil foundry

[bob mitchell]

So here is cool. Colin Peck, the fellow I am ordering the waste oil foundry book from, emailed me back after viewing N40T.  He has done some boating!!!! and clearly appreciates a project. Anyway, here is the email and two photos.

Hi Bob

Looks like you well into an interesting project there! Before I settled down and the kids came along I did some playing with boats and was living aboard. I restored a couple of carvel built cruiser / racer type yachts both around 35 ft. and played around with a couple of smaller plywood boats.

   I bought a small damaged steel sloop (24 ft.) which I played around with for a while before sailing it from the UK to New Zealand via. the Caribbean and South Pacific islands. I came back to England to buy something bigger to set off again but somehow ended up married with two kids instead, still haven’t figured out how that happened??

  The attached shows me and the boat leaving Barbados with her new bowsprit which was a hardwood banister rail I found in a derelict hose there, I beat the fittings out of some steel tube (also scavenged) on a piece of railway track. The article was done a few days before and the picture shows an experimental bowsprit I was messing around with to get the length right, I was getting rid of too much weather helm.

  The “cutter style” rig worked out to be pretty flexible and good for “wing and wing” downwind sailing, not the fastest boat in the world but she safely took me across two oceans.

  An invoice will follow this email, don’t hesitate to contact me if I can be of any help.

Regards Colin

 

 

[Eddie Offermann]

That's fantastic!

The more stories I read, both of folks that have done insanity like taking a 24ft sailboat, much of it hammered together from scrap, from the UK to New Zealand, or reading about sailing in the non-modern days, fills me with confidence about my ability to hack together solutions to anything we might run into when we set out on our own crazy adventure.

I had strongly considered, at one point, doing coastal and caribbean cruising in my Newport 20 after my first attempt to buy a Newporter failed to pan out. Sometimes, I sorta wish I'd done it anyway and gotten So Nice when I came back. I'm betting Colin has a few tales to tell!

[bob mitchell]

For sure! I am pretty excited about having an actual person on the other end of this foundry venture. Well, its 19 degrees here, with an expected high of 21, and a low tonight of 5, so there is nothing to do but go out to the garage and get my Newporter engine ready for testing.