Quote: (03-15-2012 02:14 PM)el mechanico Wrote:
I thought you wanted to sail and get pussy. Why do you want the headache of running a bamboo factory? They make boats out of PVC tubing as well now.
Good question.
Short answer; more money. Longer answer; drive to conquer more of the world and be a bigwig. Also i have a particular infatuation with bamboo. And how cool would it be to show up for the beach party in your all bamboo catamaran, be hailed as "captain bamboo", and invite the beach girls aboard to see pictures of your plantation. "Yes Captain Bamboo!"
However my dreams to use it in a boat hull may never be realized. Apparently processing it can be costly, working with it by hand is labor intensive, and using it in a composite uses a lot of urethane or epoxy - 30% by weight. This thread disses it as a hull core material
http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/archive/t-28712.html, and in the other article I mentioned it was used with a balsa core and a labor intensive thin strip/glass construction method that seems not much cheaper than other building methods.
Someone in Italy made a yacht using fiber composite. That requires a 50 ton hot press to create the boards and parts. With such equipment there may yet be an advantage to bamboo. And as it's unlikely there would be much resale in heavy bamboo-cement pontoons, for now the bamboo boat dreams would be contingent upon first having a bamboo flooring and cabinetry factory with equipment to press marine grade bamboo ply and composite boards.
And like you say - that's not just a project - that's a lifestyle decision. That means scouting out land and spending some time living on a plantation, investing in equipment and starting up a business in a sector I have no experience in. A business that would require a good deal of management attention, or at least a lot of luck in hiring staff.
And yet I still want to do that. I want to own a profitable bamboo plantation, factory, and make end products with the stuff. And if it's not totally stupid, I'd like to be involved in ship-building. Maybe such drives are just genetic. Some people never retire - they feel most at ease when taking on another project.
Maybe there is a "take over the world" combination of genes.
On a philosophical note, many people take on the attitude that attitude is just an attitude. That you don't need to be a big wig, all you need to do is to feel like a big wig. Or that game trumps money, in other words. I don't entirely agree. I see distinct realms between outward success and inward confidence in personal charisma, and see that outward success is distinctly valuable, and distinctly attractive. There is no shame in wanting that particular type of useful success, and it is willful ignorance to deny the utility of it - especially the utility of it for attracting women. I'm not saying that one needs money in order to be attractive - I'm just saying that it is a useful tool, quite distinct from the secondary characteristics such as confidence that it engenders. People run all sorts of specialized attraction games - money need not be part of it. It's just willful ignorance that holds so tightly to ones personalized non-money style of game that denies the socio-sexual value of wealth, and it's that deliberate ego sparing ignorance that refuses see what money can do. And money can be displayed such that it intertwines with status and style. Don't just earn money from a farm - arrive in style on a magificent boat created on your farm, and be famous in town as Captain Bamboo. Own a chunk of the world, and be famous for owning that chunk.
Westerners of some cultures, including my home country of Canada, are raised to be guilty of ambition, guilty of standing out, guilty of being a big wig. Westerners are taught to be humble. And then there is the whole "accept yourself as you are in order to be better than you currently are" self esteem movement. Much of common culture smells of slave morality.
