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   em (em@babka.social)'s status on Wednesday, 22-May-2024 03:21:35 JST em

   Finally have some time to make it to the ship yard. Wish me luck

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     em (em@babka.social)'s status on Wednesday, 22-May-2024 03:21:32 JST em

     in reply to

     Note, I don't think you wana use that setup as a thru-hull bc I'm pretty sure the brass and the stainless steel and the salt water will make the world's stupidest battery, and as one of the metals runs out of electrons the system will eventually fail and your boat will sink.

     Bill repeated this.
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     em (em@babka.social)'s status on Wednesday, 22-May-2024 03:21:32 JST em

     in reply to

     Your water bottle and coffee mug? They have gaskets to keep them from leaking. Your hose connection to your house, or your shower head. Gasket. I duno why, it just feels nice to see them everywhere. Like, I knew my water bottle had a rubbery thing, but it didn't occur to me that it's basically the same principle as how my sink plumbing works until I built or destroyed a few sink fixtures and learned about boat building.

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     em (em@babka.social)'s status on Wednesday, 22-May-2024 03:21:33 JST em

     in reply to

     Well I wana talk about gaskets! Did you know the whole world is basically held together by gaskets? It's extremely simple technology but so ubiquitous!

     Any time you want a liquid to be one place and not the other, you probably have a gasket or two of some kind. This is a thing I just took off a sink I'm destroying, and it looks exactly like the type of thing I'd use if I wanted to get water from inside/outside of my boat on to the outside/inside of my boat. (of course right now I can just pass water through the various rust holes in the hull).

     This thing works like: ocean - big nubby thing - gasket - hull of the boat - gasket - screw to clamp down the gasket - any hose with a valve to decide when water goes through the hole.

     So you go out to the middle of the ocean with at least like 4 of these preventing the ocean from coming into your home. Or for this particular case it just prevents the sink from leaking into your cabinet. But the principle and even form factor is basically identical.

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     em (em@babka.social)'s status on Wednesday, 22-May-2024 03:21:34 JST em

     in reply to

     While I take a break from the destruction, I wana talk about something I've been learning from this boat experience. First, that everything in the world has an entire Talmud worth of lore beside it. Like you think you know about paint if you painted some walls in a house once? Wrong! Paint is incomprehensibly complex. If you want it to stick to various materials? even more so! I'm not even talking color theory, just getting the stuff to survive its environment and stick to the thing you're painting it onto.

     But then, at the same time, when it comes to hardware, almost everything is just a remix of the same few principles. I guess how music is just a couple notes put in the right sequence, well there aren't too many new things you can do in hardware. You can basically just wedge and roll and clamp and crap like that. Modern machine theory has moved past the Six Simple Machines, but its still a pretty damn good description of the world.