Lust for Longevity?

Submitted for your approval...

Picture a rough, clandestine, coastal location accessible only by sea, somewhere around America.

What you see is a covert photo of the hidden base of operations of a secret political society called the Sons of Reliability... formed by self-described patriotic Americans who just want a reliable, mission-worthy boat, easy to diagnose “and unhindered by the whims and junk-thinking of a drunk-with-power hippie drum circle in DC.”

In the spirit of the Sons of Liberty “responding” to the King telling them what tea they could drink or what paper they could write on, the Sons of Reliability seized control of an NT42 mold and a barge-full of new-in-box 6CT’s, and to quote them, “to start making what we need ourselves, without asking some GD pothead for permission.” They went on to say, they’re “building an armada of motorized middle fingers to the lorax-b*owing tree-huggers at EPA”.... which ironically, they punctuate with the phrase “for the king’s ransoms we end up having to pay to own these things.”

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During the lightning delay for the America 250 fireworks, with the fresh memory of watching the Sons of Liberty on CSPAN expressing their opinion of the King’s taxes in Boston harbor, and a group of 8 ass-kickers erecting a giant middle finger to the former (living) occupants of Surabachi as they fled, this idea struck me as something that fits in perfectly with that... a modern expression of that same spirit of liberty.

A two-sentence pre-intro... this is long but I'm done. THE POINT I wanted to get across in this article is 99% under Governing Dynamics and the recap after it.

INTRO

My last blog entry was May of last year in which I noted my intent to head out on an open-ended walkabout to get the hell away from “a certain kind of pers idiot” to which I had become severely over exposed... I suspect most would have under the same circumstances. The unstated implication of that having been I had zero plans during that to check on any communication from that channel.

A close and trusted friend has been checking on Clock Work for me in my absence. And somewhere in that time, I contracted the most well-thought of boat washer/compounder in the marina for 4 figures worth of love.

Perhaps 3 weeks ago, I jumped into the CW email account for the first time in forever and deleted everything sitting there.. good-mood preservation, and a completely fresh start at my end. I then tested the full comms link from the site back to me, and also reviewed “all the crap that usually vibrates loose” on the site itself.. To my infinite astonishment, I couldn’t find even one single screwed up page, photo or function on the site or the email pipe. When I finally came to the next day, my first thought was THAT was definitely a black swan to this technology-bigot/tech biz owner.

Two things lead to this pause of my walkabout, which I was enjoying massively. First, a mix of the odd conversation and encouragement with friends. And second, a seemingly irrelevant to this but actually much to the contrary... me paying severe attention to the eastern US truck market to replace my best-in-breed drive-train durability 2004/300,000 fault-free mile SUV with a low-mileage (150k) exact copy or two. So a pause, to test the current selling conditions.

Regarding Governing Dynamics

The milestones/trajectory of a good NT/6CT entering the secondary market over time needs to be laid out more clearly and that is the main thrust of this blog. I say this because it's the rule, not the exception, for people to.. even post hoc/after the dust has finished settling... to, in their minds still, push/force every new outlier you might bring up to them into their single very simplified model of how something works... rather than understanding there can be... often are... better explanations for that outlier, that one might sometimes even be able to exploit [End note 0.1].

First, it’s important to explain that truck market thing as it hopefully feeds forward to understanding whether it’s even worth your time to contact me about Clock Work. I hope you do, but it’s useful knowing I’m following new rules here now. That truck I’m replacing and the designed-by-God engine/trans combo delivered flawless 100%-perfect service across every mile... forget about whether it ever stranded me.. it never once interrupted a single mission/sortie due to even a minor engine or trans issue [End note 1].  I bought that truck new specifically for that engine in ’04 (BTW, precisely why I also bought Clock Work)... and the projected increased availability of usable future heartbeats and de minimis cost of ownership, which I can truthfully attest was a great decision. Though in doing so, also had to then park a large pile of personally embarrassing pointless/useless, built-in idiot-features in our driveway, and hope constantly none of my smart friends drove by [End note 2]. Five or so years ago, exact-year copies of my truck were what most would call free and plentiful.. but since then, the price has gone to the moon (recently $55k for a year-exact replacement for my 2004) while the availability of desirable units has plummeted. New pricing for a 26 yr old copy in good condition.

The experience hunting a proper replacement truck combines with multiple other similar personal engine-reputation-driven lust-experiences to inform how I’m intentionally approaching a Clock Work sale. The value proposition for this boat is quite different than the vast majority of units on YW and broker sites and it might be potentially useful for interested parties to understand this difference, and my understanding and business application of that difference.

The core of that differentiating value proposition is what I’ll call the Hot Engine Effect, or if you prefer a term that sucks less, Diffusion of Systems-Design Insight. The effect is simple and can happen in numerous other vehicle/equipment types.. cars, trucks, ag equipment, yachts, motorcycles, etc. Even outside the engine space, look my Marantz 4400, originally $700 and now selling for $10k. Back to engines, this reliably occurs when a well-designed engine consistently demonstrates uncommon reliability... becomes legendary.. and is ultimately recognized by the masses, which then triggers the collapsing inventory/rising price phase. And to have that bet-your-life-on-it/keep-your-money-in-your-wallet reliability mission-worthiness, you need a few other supporting/secondary design elements like subsystems which don’t philosophically clash with the design principles/wisdom that made the engine itself legendary.

The hot-engine effect accurately describes the reputation-vs-time status of numerous well-known engines, a few of which have bitten me... .the OM617/W123... Cummins 5.9L truck.. FJ80 Land Cruiser.. 4Runner gen-4... all once nearly free and widely available on the secondary mkt.  Now? Good luck finding a keeper, and if you do, the phrases “order of magnitude” or possibly in the very final stage, “are both your kidneys healthy Sir?” will not infrequently be present when discussing the price with you.  I was an idiot to not buy a couple of what I’m personally working (now, too hard) to replace, when they were only $6-8k in good condition just like 2-4 yr ago. My engine still had factory compression ~3 yr ago. I could pay a stupid high price but.. a Pyrrhic victory ain’t one.  So...

• An engine design in the market builds toward legendary reliability status over time

• Ultimately, some bureaucrat or MBA “has an idea” and a replacement is announced or mandated

• The supply of good engines in the universe instantly becomes fixed

• Nothing coming from upstream to feed the secondary market for the good engine

• Inventory steadily drops toward sparse, and faster if some "genius" invents cash for clunkers, while...

• Prices climb steadily

• In the course of time, the market figured out the “new thing” sucks relative to the old thing despite the slick marketing, the glossy brochures, and all the useless yuppie crap they build in to it now.

• And in the end, you have another wish-I-acted-sooner story for your life. I have plenty of my own. [Please try to see the silver lining though:  the fact that the replacement engine that.. you know.. sucks... will, guaranteed/I promise... suck less than the engine that replaces it. Govt is not mysterious either, and entropy is a rule. Of course, the icing on the cake... even more useless yuppie crap on it to play with... huzzah!! Well... until you become disillusioned. Again.]

Moral of the story....

• The only path to a clean win is to actually buy at the plentiful/bottom, and to enjoy the choice you have there.

• And after that during the too-late/your-dream-is-dead phase, when everyone “knows”, act quick if you come upon a gray-swan/clean copy because “clean copy” is singular and after that one’s gone, the price for the next one, if there is one, ratchets up higher still and you can’t know which one will be the last one. Maybe this 42/6CT.. maybe not. Maybe's a funny word. But you know it’s inbound... right? 

So maybe there’s a lesson in all this some place, just in case another reliability/cause-effect psycho like me ever reads this.

Recap: Clock Work

Just bullets.. I forgot how much I hate wasting heartbeats on blog BS..

• Inventory - I didn’t look even once at inventory while I was away, but for the preceding many years... Clock Work was the only 42 with the good engine  [End note 2A] this status noted repeatedly across multiple prior blogs/time-frames.
  

  • I peeked a couple of weeks ago.. there were only a couple of 42’s on the east coast.. neither had the good engine (6CT).
    

  • A strong argument can be made that the market for the 42/6CT is about to exit  that final stage of trace availability... 1 unit...  of its hot engine process.  So... if you want a more reliable, lower hassle, cheaper maintenance, fails-gracefully-instead-of-instantly 42 than you can buy new, I might know where you can get one.  Given YEARS where all I saw was Clock Work in the 42/6CT inventory, this might be the final chance. Something to add to your calculus on this... what if there are 2 guys who want it? 3 guys?  More? Watch how sales of nice W123's or Cummins 5.9's go, when they come up.
    

  • Got a link  from a friend while writing this.. a broker I um.. know... who BTW actually had his shot at Clock Work once, is asking on his WANTED page:
    

    • ... Looking for Nordic Tug listings

    • This is the strongest pre-owned market that we’ve seen

    • The demand exceeds the supply
      

Don’t trust me.. those are a certified insider’s characterization of the market.. Two questions.. just me thinking out loud....

• When has anyone seen a brokerage site with a dedicated WANTED page? Dedicated to a single brand? Does this tell the astute observer anything? and...
  

• What do you suppose the probability is he’ll recommend Clock Work... which at one time he sat in and then after commending me earlier on the condition she was in, emphatically corrected me when I said it still has almost 80% of its factor projected engine life left and insisted “WAY more than that!”. He knows we’re here.. I’m...... sure... he’ll do the right thing for his customer. He said he wanted to sell it once.

• Top bullets of the breed (6CT) itself:

  • Significantly higher asymptotic reliability ---> mission-worthiness –  i.e. If it’s not there, it can’t fail.   [End note 2B]

  • Lower projected ownership costs (operating/maint/repairs)

  • Avoidance of a potentially dangerous failure mode native to electronic control – Sudden Engine Death, vs the mere adjustment-drift of mechanical. [End note 2C]

  • Lowest diagnostic complexity 
    

• Top bullets – Clock Work specifically

  
  

  • It has stopped aging, as I’m a doxastically committed former boater now.

    • Clock Work has almost 80% of the standard factory projected engine life remaining,

    • And well over 95% of the typical ACTUAL mean engine life.

    • Hot-engine candidate, you know.

  • Also note I upgraded the thruster set, bow and stern. I doubt there’s even 5 min on them.
    

• Selling process

  • The business focus of selling this boat is on the engine... matching the value proposition described all over this web site to one of those guys who seeks the sort of platform that delivers exactly that proposition. From past efforts chasing "hot-engine" vehicles and other hall-of fame older products, something I paid attention to was who were the guys hammering in new bids anytime someone else topped them.
    

  • By the prior bullet, I'm not putting one more second into this blog, or screwing with this site anymore or teaching anyone anything anymore so they can feel like mini-systems engineers/designers... a mere handful of determined idiots stormed my email and phone last year dialed my attitude up to 11.
    

  • CRUCIAL – The contribution of the engine will drive any value discussion I’m in, BUT ALSO, I’m not trying to divert any attention from any other aspect of Clock Work. I took GREAT care of it, AND I knew what I was doing because I don’t mean “I change my own oil” when I say I’m mechanical. The boat was perfect when I put it away, other than that DESIGNED-IN generator oil leak [End Note 3]. I'm simply trying to be clear on my business focus... that conversations will be about the engine opportunity will lead, and dominate my approach. The evidence (years of tracking inventory) suggests you aren’t going to see another one of these in this shape for a long time. No... I don’t know with certainty though. And neither do you.
    

  • So the part where I'd expect the most skepticism is this.. I pay attention to the economy because a left over habit I can't shake is the business owner instinct to watch the economy and trends because I used to have to invest in the biz. Not even in the top 75% of interesting stuff you blow time on most days. Forbes, Bloomberg.. maybe yahoo finance sometimes. It's a habit I can't shake and the sense I have is that category of guy who's going to chase a late stage hot-engine opportunity and can actually articulate why he wants a nice specimen happens to be the guy who's doing just fine. Comfortable they're out there because I remember several times talking with guys who went big on winning a great/unique specimen and same kind of guys I just mentioned. Feeling good with the particular business focus I've articulated in this article (very slightly more dignity than blog).

• The Clock Work site
  

  • Thru this site, I’ve provided a massive aggregation of information. You know a lot about Clock Work and you know a lot about the guy who took care of it. This is very probably the best documented/discussed boat on the market anywhere, with built in lessons from a practicing 50,000+ expert on technical decision-making around systems thinking. There’s a lot here and I’m done adding to that any further.
    

  • This site has glowing endorsements from people who know me, my priorities, a sense of my skills, and the boat. This site has received dozens of emails complimenting the approach here in communicating useful information and of my explanations. I hate working on this stupid f’ing blog, but did very much appreciate those messages, and have met some good guys through it.
    

  • Most of this site hasn’t been and won’t be touched further. MIGHT dust off the landing page.
    

Interesting related happenstance... Early this past winter, I was talking with a support engineer at an ag gear distributor before the blizzard re: something I added to the blower. FYI, my snow setup belongs at O'Hare. My question answered, the conversation shifted to the design of big agricultural equipment because of my 10/10 design-fetish. I remember us discussing the unintended consequences of the EPA seizing every possible opportunity to do a nation-scale impersonation of a high-energy control-freak karen aggressively growing “her” HOA board into a Fourth Reich.  And then... we got to mandated diesel engine tiers. He’d worked with/on design teams migrating big farming machines to the new tiers. Me? I just carry around a 50+ year massive philosophical repugnance of hobby-thinker bureaucrats with a pension and zero skin in the game, dicking around in complex solution spaces they pretend to care for/understand. He noted numerous issues the teams experienced wedging in the new save-the-world control systems, and then more they didn’t/couldn’t predict from their customers. When I described my considered POV and sent him to the complexity vs reliability post I wrote, he said something like “Hey!... that circulated around our platform integration guys! I’m talking to a celebrity!” which I took that to mean it generally made sense to actual professionals. So much for Chevron Deference I think.

Tips for initiating a successful conversation

Regarding all the discussion about engine systems design best-practices, and related ideas for understanding the mission-worthiness/reliability of the resulting system... I’ll be the first to concede these perspectives fully land with, at best, ~10-20% of anyone reading here. Significant lived experience tells me your typical guy walking down the street/dock is oblivious... and happily so, God bless him.. to those modes of thought. And, NOT a problem.. this is America (or if you prefer, this is not Russia. Or New York City). My best estimate is he’d be a decent, pleasant guy based upon the many folks I’ve met in boating. I met lots of good people and made plenty of friends, and never asked any to see their SAT math scores or CV’s.

AND by exactly that... he’s not the guy I’m trying to reach, i.e. NOT an engine guy. Not in that 10-20%. Zero passion/depth typically showing on that topic. As it’s all about heartbeats now.. selfishly, mine, it’s time to recognize I can have the conversation I need to develop or rule out the potential for a sale more efficiently if the other guy is technically/systems proficient/experienced too. AND wants the good engine.

The common mindset the guys along that dock are thinking is lux... of course, some more than others. I have never been surprised by Lux adherents actually caring about “mission-worthiness”. You will not hear that usual guy ever ever ever go near any systems-technical/engineering concepts, or especially, bring it up in the presence of people they don’t know (risky). System-evaluation concepts like actual reliability (vs that parroted from the brochure, a broker or the blowhard regular from his stool at the marina bar).. mission-worthiness... success and failure factors for mechanical system design.. complexity... etc. don’t develop/refine reading forums, brochures or watching YT videos, but from numerous hours of training, education and experience. And crucially, informed skin in the game.

It’s worth noting here that’s this systems language and the related concepts are things anyone who wants to discuss Clock Work with me will need to accept. 

In Closing

Will this pause of the walkabout last to the finish line? It’d be nice.. but it’ll sell or it won’t sell. And I’ll bail out again, or I won’t. Either way, the engine-hours will continue to hold constant while wall-clock time marches on. And those few typically less-equipped 42’s with 6CT’s that might have been inventory watch their hours climb further.. maintained most likely by average boat owners (maintenance standards and skills in boating are, in my opinion, nothing to brag about). And the secondary market will continue to be fed on the only alternative.... the no-longer-new units with Tier-99 or whatever engines.. their microprocessor swarms controlling every thing, while pitching that to the suggestible lux class as a good thing. This is very much what most yuppies eat up with a spoon because those psych PhD’s in marketing know their stuff.

Ultimately, those “new engines” will become known for not being as reliable as the engine they used to put in to 42's because complexity isn't a made-up thing... and some, significant repair bills and diagnostic complexity (thank you inexorable creep of system complexities and the associated introduction of microprocessor swarms --> distributed complex control with insane interdependencies that make no sense to anyone but the geeks or the AI who coded it, which are notoriously a giant bitch to diagnose... ask how I know.   AWESOME! Nothing but good for CW.

-- Save the Lorax --

End Notes

[End note 0.1] This aspect of default thinking by the uncurious/unmotivated (not a dig, just how most people end up) and the harm it can yield could fill a a book, and has.. Suggested authors include T. Kuhn, J Gleick, N. Taleb, D. Kahneman, J. Horgan, and 100 others. If you're not the uncurious type, I might suggest looking into the contribution and ironic fate of Ignaz Semmelweis at the hands of his learned colleagues, and don't fail to dig in to his 10/10-ironic cause of death. <--- Somebody please forward this note to my biographer as the single most useless thing I typed back when I was alive.

[End note 1]  So what actually killed 10 or so family missions dead over my 22 yr with it? The yuppie bullshit shoveled into the design to impress people who should stay as far away from systems/mechanical/mission-worthiness decision/opinion-making for non-aesthetic/cause-effect-governed hardware and operating modes which serve no actually useful purpose. Which, btw, falls under the purview of my most personal top Rule to Fix the World... "If you don't design EVERY day, don't design on ANY day". And note this history of mission-killers of my truck is precisely analogous to all the mission-useless superfluous yuppie crap boat manufacturers pile into the microprocessor-swarm now mandated to effect Tier-3/4/etc functionality in recreational marine engines... which serve very much to distract potential buyers from the complexity-driven asymptotic reliability reduction and asymptotic cost-of-ownership increase... so it benefits someone!  I mean, we all know that couple on the docks who brag about how much their last screwing cost them. At least I do. For real.

[End note 2]  i.e. crap “designed”.. wait, no.. I can’t bring myself to blaspheme a process I hold to be sacred... let’s use “cut/pasted”.. in to the vehicle to attract more... be nice... be nice... be nice... people who umm... habitually.. utterly... from the hip, universally without a speck of experience/training.. buy into shit ideas that are communicated to them through extremely well-studied methods by guys with advanced degrees in psychology and who quite productively obsess over LIKE button reactions, measured influencer effectiveness, and big bonuses... to stimulate feeling/aspiration/status rather than thinking in targets/buyers who really don’t even understand why their truck moves beyond the usual explanation of pushing their right deck shoe down. That is... halo effect... not considered judgment. Early on, I personally removed almost all of that crap just to save face with thought/design-proficient peers. Yes.. I suspect it shows that I struggle slightly to see the point of lux, or especially lux-trumps-the mission anything.

[End note 2A] –  Though yes.. if you do know the market, I’m intentionally ignoring that Frankenstein 42 out of FL several years ago

[End note 2B] – I had to come up with that  not there--> can’t fail  thing to explain how complexity (e.g. crap that contributes nothing to the mission) works to a “certain kind of guy”. Amazingly, I’ve met guys who try to argue that. Met several immediately before the walkabout.

[End note 2C] -- The Sudden Engine-Death trick is a feature pathognomonic to electronic engine controls and is a great reason to stay as far away from lee-shores as you can if you chose to own one. Contrast with a fails-gracefully mechanical (like Clock Work) -- slow fail --->  finish the mission/go where you want  --->  adjust back to perfect w/ a screwdriver when you return to the dock. Documented extensively years ago in these blogs. If you like to read comments from people who have experienced 1 up to many ECM sudden death events in their electronically controlled truck engines (Cummins also), track down the blog here titled Diesel Engine complexity vs Reliability/Mission – Silicon vs Cast Iron. About half-way through I believe. One guy had FOUR!!! Yea.. be THAT guy.

[End Note 3]. CW was put away near perfect and moved to full perfect when I fixed the GD design-in oil leak... and NOT for the $10k starting price.. i.e. diagnosis... from each of 3 so-called mechanics who had no idea how to even participate in a discussion about diagnosis. That’s me... I have significant skills and experience in mechanical/diagnostic/systems matters because I enjoy the living hell out of doing ANYTHING that involves engineered machinery, and especially figuring out problems in it others cannot. I cannot NOT consider mission-worthiness and design approaches in them, and my patience for predators who pretend to be mechanics, or “professional” sellers (who have shit on CW presumably because they can’t make money on it... happened for real), or other service providers was gone long before I put her up for sale.