Brilliant at Breakfast asks a question, news from Paraguay, and an economic measure most of us can understand...
Some years back, friends of ours on a Colvin Gazelle had us over for a sail and some lunch...
While eating lunch I noticed that their bimini frame was made of PVC pipe so I asked them about it. The reason behind the PVC had to do with the fact that they wanted to experiment with heights and geometry before they spent a lot of money on stainless tubing, and suchlike. PVC, being cheap, is a great material for prototyping of this sort.
So, I asked how the project was going and he told me that they'd settled on the current system several years before but had not been able to find someone willing to do the stainless work within their cruising schedule. Since the PVC bimini frame was still going strong after a few years of tropical sun, day-to-day wear and tear, the odd tropical storm, and a hurricane, they no longer felt a burning need to replace the prototype frame with a very expensive stainless one.
PVC pipe is cool stuff!
Point of fact, our new wind generator is going to be sitting on a PVC pole which comes to a fraction of the cost of an alloy pipe. I'll let you know how that goes...
Speaking of PVC pipe, I just picked up a very cool new book "The Impossible Bow: Building Archery Bows With PVC Pipe" partly, because I've been looking for the how-to of Mongolian horse bows which seem to be a perfect match for someone who wants a boat-friendly archery set-up and partly because I thought the sections on how to form PVC pipe into different shapes would come in handy for a variety of boat projects down the line...
Listening to Rickie Lee Jones
So it goes...
