Bikes or Boats
Bikes or boats.
Boats or bikes.
Lots in common.
Lots of differences.
I’ve learned a lot in the month or so I’ve done helping to repair boats.
Most of all I learned how.little I know about repairing boats. That’s not to say I cannot do the job. I simply didn’t know what the job entailed when I started, althoughI have learned a few things.
Terms like port and starboard I already knew. Port is left, same amount of letters in both words so that’s easy. Fed light goes on the left/port side. Green on the right. Again, easy, red on the left. Yep, as someone who studied post revolutionary Soviet Russia I am well aware of the fact that the reds are on the left.
Afmontage has to do with the decorative bits on the boat that gives it its style. Kind of like flames or tailfins on cars from American Graffiti.
I was initially confusing Afmontage with Decolletage. Oops, it’s been awhile, the mind can wander.
I learned that shipyard people are working their asses off in a variety of departments and areas.
Painting. Resand the hull, coat of primer, make the waterline, couple of more coats after that. Remove old stickers with a heat gun. Also, before painting make sure to scrape off all the barnacles, which can be very very numerous.
The carpentry team, way out of my league. A whole workshop, design work, shaping windows and decks. I could pick up hull work quickly, wood work is a skill that would take much more time to learn.
Some of the people were welding all day, pounding out repairing ship hulls or creating brand new ones. Make a skeleton of a hull and start welding/shaping pieces of metal to it. Noisy, physical work but after a few days you’d look and say “yep, that’s turning into a nice boat”.
So skilled work all around, some I could pick up, other work would take more training and time.
Engines.
Engines were different yet similar to engines for Ebikes.
New engines for boats are going electric in Amsterdam so most if it is a battery pack instead of fuel providing power to the electric engine. Far less moving parts than a combustion engine. Some of them, I was told, we don’t even work on. If there’s an issue we send it to the manufacturer, they fix it and send it back.
That is one of the ways in which I found boats similar to bikes. Ebike engines, when they stop working, are not, for the most part, worked on by the mechanics where you drop your bike off for repairs. They’re shipped to Bosch or whoever designed the engine. Same as with the electric boat engine then, they fix it and send it back.
Another similarity. The design and placement of the engine. How it fits into the transportation machine, be it a boat or a bike.
The hooking of everything up is remarkably similar. Bolt the engine into place tightly, making sure it doesn’t vibrate. Attach it to the propeller if a boat. Pedal arms if a bike. Install the electronic sensor that measures the RPM’s, hopefully preventing the engine from burning out.
And finally, hooking up all the cables, plugging stuff back in so it’ll make things run.
Seems simple, doesn’t it.
Here’s the thing, it is and isn’t.
It’s simple that hooking everything back up is pretty self explanatory. When working with Ebikes though the cables run through the whole bicycle to hook up the engine and battery with the computer/control screen, lights and other bits.
The design, though, leaves much to be desired. Like if someone installed a stereo system back in the ‘80’s and ran the speaker cables behind the wall. Meaning you’ll have to break down the wall, remove the broken cable, plug in the new one and then respackle the all so it all looks nice and smooth.
Boats, as you can see here, have a similar type of design. Fit the engine in snuggly with hard to reach nuts and bolts. Tuck the cables away, ensuring that plugging and unplugging them easily is not possible. Instead you’re blindly trying to thread a cable from one area to another hoping it’ll make it through in the end.
That, I found, is what bikes and boats have most in common with each other.
Designers and engineers of either product, bikes or boats, hate mechanics.
And the feeling is mutual