When something's burning way more heartbeats than I'd like or seems necessary, I will usually immediately remember this thing that once happened to Beethoven... or actually to a concert goer in his audience.. and also Beethoven. At the debut of his Eroica symphony in Vienna, with Beethoven actually conducting, an audience member frustrated the piece taking too long, and well after it should have ended (in his mind) yelled out "I will gladly pay another Kreutzer if it will simply stop!" So with this blog, I'm fixing to dig out another Kreutzer.
This is mostly an announcement of one thing regarding my plans for Clock Work (1/2 way down in blue text). While I'm here, I'll probably squeeze a few other minor things.
About Purchase Option #2 -
Trigger - I had a tear appear in the plastic ~last Fall. The plastic panels separated up by the fly bridge but didn't propagate past the opening which just isn't urgent if you have something better to do. Last week, I decided to head down and repair it to keep the birds and the bees out. To my disgust... some AH POS at the marina box-cuttered the zipper-door out of the plastic at the swim platform. The marina yard manager (great guy), quickly found me a new one and brought it by. Much appreciated Danny. I could have made that work given I had half the US supply of Flex-Tape in the back of my truck, except... we then shortly discovered the jerk also stole every single stinking vent.... a dozen? With that, I'm done with marinas and pretending to be ok with the ceaseless crap that you have to put up with in boating. I haven't met anyone down there that's had half the amount of stuff stolen I've had... multiple shore-power cables, multiple new dock lines, shore-power adapters, new full cans of bottom paint, a wash down hose (might have been 2) and probably some things I'm thankfully forgetting. I can get that kind of abuse up here living next to the armpit of New England for free. A third equally unexpected disappointment I had when I looked at the plastic before even going up the ladder.... the shrink job this time was the worst I've had so far or seen on any of my friends boats... most of the seams in ratty shape... they always hold up better than this, and this time, the boat was in the most protected possible position within the marina. I really thought that guy was good for a few years. Literally the service provider I thought most of. Recommended him to dozens of friends including those with big non-boating industrial equipment needs for wrap. He seemingly to me just threw the wrap on and then went silent. My new normal in tradesman and services. Fits right in with my $500 crimp and the bonus carpet stain.
New Plan - Had a chat earlier this week with a friend from my police motorcycling days. We've spent a lot of time discussing wrenching/repair/diagnostic best practices for engines and a lot of that about Kawasaki 4-cylinder engines, which I have on both my KZP's, and which he has on a couple of his bikes, drag and street. He's a former military aircraft mechanic and we're just wired up pretty similar, so maybe we can collaborate to improve my life a bit and have some fun in the process. Clock Work's likely path forward....
A quick yachtworld inventory of availability for proper NT42's.... CT-6 mechanical engine, the second-gen layout with or without a flybridge.. makes it appear there's nothing in the east-coast market. Even when the market was up at 10-12 units, demand chewed that down to zero pretty fast. Of course, there's also new from the factory, at a multiple of this price and however long delivery is now. And which includes the EPA's choice of engine and whatever impact that added complexity places on the stochastic reliability and mission-worthiness.
If I could be talked into doing the unpleasant logistics right now to sell under pricing Option #1, which I cannot due to gross over commitment on my part, I'd raise the price, currently $459k. Maybe $475k or even $500k... they aren't making any new ones not burdened with EPA-mandated (pointless to this systems engineer) complexity. The EPA-mandated gizmos may also eat up room in your engine room (see the blog "A Thank you to the EPA") and they eat diesel fluid. Thank God for the zero-hours hippies and hobby-thinkers who just know down to their bones this stuff is pure wonderful.
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So at the moment if someone wants to purchase CW under Option #2, it's still available. I just took that price down to $390k.... another Kreutzer.
If it doesn't go before I need to pay the summer bill, I'm leaning strongly toward immediately terminating Option 2 and collaborating with my friend to punch up the (very) short list of entropy items that all showed up after she came out of the water and had been thoroughly gone through by a Nordic Tug specialist. Two items and some batteries to get back to perfect. Check the Readiness blog. It'll also need a bunch of external cleanup which itself should go quick... I hired the top guy in the marina to compound and wax it before she went on the hard. At that point it's back to just Option #1. If the market/inventory holds where it is, I'm thinking $500k or more is justified and at least to this systems engineer it's a better boat than you can get new and that was my thinking when I bought it, and it still is. Beyond the short punch list, I'd probably put a zero-maintenance appliqué on the blue hull stripe instead of working through the procedure I worked out (2-3 weeks experimentation and final execution) to make that thing a nice deep blue. The plan's not carved in stone but it's time to do something different, this seems easy and in the process justifies a higher selling price.
Behind the curtain - This site is wildly overly instrumented and rats out visitors on everything except their blood type. I don't use the vast majority of it because I've been on the internet since it was the arpanet, and think all this privacy tracking/invasion sucks, and anyone who does it just because they can is obvious low-creativity and pure AH. But one thing you just can't miss with the plethora of reports it sticks in my face on my infrequent visits here is that THE top visitor interest is the blog about Option 2. So that is what this blog entry is about... the impending likely retirement of Option 2.
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Miscellany -
Bob.. thank you for enduring the unimaginable hell of crawling thru all my blogs and catching the 70,000 typos. Didn't expect that, but I very much appreciate it. Hope I didn't add too many new ones rolling out your fixes! But also just one more thing.... for the love of God, please, get a life:) *I* have to be here, you do not.
I have had some appreciated comments about providing a wealth of information about CW, and particularly from a high-hours systems perspective. But I've also joined in the opinion of some that the blogs are a mixture of message types that range from "relevant to decision-support" to those that are "decision-irrelevant", the latter stuff that mostly supports discussions with friends I made through this site. While punching up the typos, I found a simple way for visitors to focus on the most decision-relevant info. At the top of the blog page, one can choose whatever sort you wish.
Added fault-tolerance to the tech - As indicated in other posts, over time, by far, the biggest source of missed connections between me and interested parties has been technology failures (cf "Philosophical Shift...")... specifically, the channel from the contact form on this site (CW landing page) connecting interested parties to me. The email provider I selected when I built this site is one that has in the interim employed escalating thug-like customer-hostile behavior against us uppity users of defenses that keep the privacy-rapists at arm's length. I won't openly comment on specifics, but I've made a few subtle changes to hopefully torpedo the most common failure/interruption sources of delay/lost contacts.. I really should have thought of them much sooner. I'll also set up an alternate contact method for the next unpredictable/opaque failure-mode they invent or decay into. Translate the gibberish between the $-signs just below. It's a throw-away message box, either voice or text. I check it every couple of days. Please don't hesitate to use the alternate if the primary seems dead and if you do, I ask you put something in your message to make it clear you're real, and your email. !@#$----. ..... ----. -....- ....- ..... -.... -....- .---- ..--- ..--- ...--$%^& [Added 4/24] - Pleasant privacy surprise - Just checking that I didn't blow something up after my update storm yesterday, and instead of just noticing the lack of a mushroom cloud and diving straight in to my real job, I (perversely) walked around gawking at the plethora of traffic source reports. I clicked on one that made me smile.... year to date, as many of you guys are using a serious privacy-aware browser as are using the least-privacy aware one.... you know who. Just, WAY TO GO.... screw tech back with all you got (says this tech company owner). You may want to also look in to the Brave Browser too, but ANYthing's better than going with the emperor's-new-clothes choice! The Brave deal messes with their browser fingerprinting. Look into browser-isolation too, and no matter what, use a vpn from a credible provider (most are not). Just wanted to congratulate the unexpectedly smart behavior... unexpectedly because a study out of Australia I want to say around 2012 shared the amazing statistic that even in the face of knowing to a certainty your information is being misused, compiled, and otherwise applied against your best interest, only 12% of people ever choose to do something about it <<---- this also known as THE grenade my family does not want to pull the pin from at our Thanksgiving table while I'm still alive. [Added 5/5] - I think I'm going to shift gears... i.e. get on now with killing the two entropy-driven items on the punch list blog myself at my own pace (<1 week I'm guessing). Then, re-evaluate/restore the market/inventory-driven price, and hand it off to someone else more able to politely tolerate the 30% of "intellectually diverse", entitled, life-sucking, low-hours/skills, youtube/forum-educated, talk-over-you, know-it-all traffic. 30%.. not everyone. It is impressive though how just a couple of phone calls can explosively avalanche you past that limit you thought you had where you could put up.. politely.. with a certain kind of person for short periods. Site and email updates of any kind unlikely to be an interest of mine moving forward.