It’s been a year now that my main web presence has been a wall of text about what I was thinking about and working on at the end of 2023.
That’s gone well, I think. It’s been a helpful place for people to land when they have my name or email address and are trying to get some deeper context for me. People do seem to take the time to read it, for which I am grateful.
It was also a helpful exercise for me. And of course, since it has been a year, and we’re once again in that light-starved liminal period at the end of December, I should do it again.
So: I still don’t have a legible job, and that’s still great except when introducing myself at parties. I sometimes consider claiming to be a boatbuilder, but have not yet had the courage for such a bold new identity.
I do spend an awful lot of time thinking about boat design, however, and managing the build of one boat in particular. Although the first Solander 38 did not, as I once hoped, make it into the water last summer, construction is well under way and I’m pleased with how things are going.
To recap: this is an electric 38’ catamaran, using an existing sailing catamaran hull design, but replacing the mast and wheelhouse with a custom aluminum superstructure that builds in enough solar power to make it totally self-sufficient for coastal cruising.
It’s been fantastic working on this with experts in composite fabrication, hydrodynamics, aluminum welding, machining, mold making, DC electrical systems, marine thermodynamics, and so on. I’m learning an incredible amount, which is my favorite place to be.
The status is the two composite hulls are complete, having been trucked from the fiberglass shop in Ohio that owns the molds to the boatyard in Port Townsend where we’re finishing the structure. The cross-deck is still being laminated but will follow shortly.
Meanwhile, the drivetrain is complete and ready for installation, the shop drawings for the superstructure are being reviewed by the fabricators, the cabinet maker has started planing some local maple, and I’ve got a mountain of LFP blade cells and other electronics that I’m slowly turning into a battery pack.
This summer there will be some cruising.
Stepping back a bit: I keep getting more interested in electric boats as a category. It feels like electric cars in the early 2000s, where mainstream awareness and acceptance was effectively zero; and yet it feels equally important and inevitable to me that the shift from “electric is weird and niche” to “electric is obviously better” will happen. I think it took about 15 years for cars (starting with the Tesla and the Leaf, until now), so maybe that’s a good estimate of how long it will take for boats as well. I’d like to help make that happen.
I also spend a lot of time managing house building, though unlike with the boat where I’m literally thinking about every bolt, with housing I’m thankfully operating in the arena of zoning, permits, leases, loans, and other such abstractions. The Galiano Cottage Co-op is well and truly underway, with one 2BR unit complete and ready to live in, and three more projected to complete in May. The construction part is going very smoothly. I’m not sure we’ve got the financing model right. The fact is that building detached housing is expensive, and it‘s hard to make the rents as affordable as we’d like without significant subsidy. I’d love to be building multi-unit housing instead but the local zoning simply won’t support it, and rule one with this project is to go with the flow of existing bylaws rather than get caught up in years of public hearings. There are some funding possibilities on the horizon, but lots more work to do there next year.
One thing I don’t spend a lot of time on anymore is Galiano’s radios-in-trees community internet infrastructure. We’re finally at a place where there’s a stable group of staff and decent systems in place and positive cash flow and it’s just ticking along. Of course, just as we get there, there’s a new government-funded fiber build starting which will make us totally obsolete - but becoming unnecessary has always been our fondest hope. More time for boats!
I’ll briefly mention the on-island plastic recycling project to say: it works, but it’s incredibly labor intensive to turn dirty waste plastic into usable sheet goods, and the Precious Plastic-designed machinery is not very robust (at least in the implementation we have). I keep having to remind myself and others that documenting the failure modes is at least as valuable as documenting the happy path.
A new place I’m spending a lot of time is in a pretty serious CAD/CAE research project, combining parametric CAD constraint systems with SDF/implicit shape representations and global shape optimization. We’re not ready to release anything yet but definitely will in the new year.
There’s a fantastic group of folks working with me on this. One of the notable things about this group is that, deliberately, everyone is half time on this and half time on their own individual research. This violates the conventional wisdom that you should hire people who are willing to commit themselves 100% to your project. Maybe for a startup the conventional wisdom is true. But for a research project there’s a really great energy in bringing together a group that also have strong independent interests, and it’s also much easier to pitch people on “trade some of your time for money that can fund your own research” than “give up all of your time to someone else”.
In general, I’m really looking forward to 2025. The boat will launch. Houses will get lived in. We’ll demo some CAD tools.
And one more thing. Maybe. If it happens, it’ll be the most recklessly ambitious thing I’ve done. I’ll keep you posted.