How Many Hours did it take to build a 37' LNVT? (Tuggers Vol.62)

I was running some numbers in my head today while Cetoling Nellie's companionway door and came to an obvious but startling conclusion, the number of man hours in an LNVT is huge.  Here's the back of the envelope calculation.

Given:

According to Tommy Chen 250 people work at the OEY yard in the peak years

1 person works 2000 hours/year

In 1986 OEY made 33 boats: 4-41LNs; 12-35LNs; and 17-37VTs (the peak year)

Assume:

VTs and LNs evenly split the available labor hours (there's some quibble room here)

Result:

250,000 man hours = 250 men * 1,000 hours/man

14,705 man-hours/tug = 100,000 man-hours / 17 tugs

Or

About 7-1/3 man-years/tug

That's a lot of hours!

Posted by: Dave Howell

Anticipation is Making Me Wait (Tuggers Vol 62)

By Lee & Dee Anderson, Jack Robert #17

Winter in Minnesota is usually long and deep.  Jack Robert #17  sits quietly on his cradle in the marina yard with a layer of snow on him.  Wish we could afford inside heated storage to allow us to work on the brightwork and interior.  Instead we have to be content to travel to the marina to check up on things and dream of warmer days.  The downside besides the obvious is that the more we anticipate the spring the wait becomes even longer then the three long months we have left.  So what occupies us during the wait?

Promptly after the boat was hauled at the end of October we started a remodeling project in our house.  The main bath needed a major refurb.  This meant tearing everything out down to the studs.  Whatever was in the drawers and such was moved to a bedroom.  New materials, supplies, vanity, etc. all got moved in and took over our living room.  

Like a boat project the scope grew to included replacing the kitchen ceiling ostensibly damaged by the leaking shower in the bath.  Where does all the stuff from the kitchen get moved in order to work in the kitchen, the dining room, of course.  We have 34 cabinets in the kitchen so things expended into the family room off the dining room.  The kitchen ceiling is removed to uncover a slowly dripping rusted 100+ year water pipe that actually was the primary cause of the ceiling damage.  We were  forced to replace the plumbing. We also uncovered knob and tube wiring that needed to be replaced.  So, whatever budget we had for the bath has now been exceeded by a factor 2.5.

We are now relegated to three rooms just a bit bigger then our tug.  We will still be in this situation until the end of January.  Three months in about the same space as Jack Robert with two neurotic cats has proved we can live on the tug full time when we retire.  Life is good.

Howells End Trip to the Far East with Tommy Chen (Tuggers Vol.62)

For the past two months, the Howells, our fearless leader Dave, and our Tuggers editor  Vicki, have been traveling in China with Tommy Chen, builder of our tugs in Taiwan in the 1980s. (Note: they are not traveling by tug!) 

Dave writes:
Winding down here in Taiwan. We had a great visit with Tommy in Taipei yesterday. We saw the first yard he worked in and the first sailboats, the CT-41, that he worked on. In this picture he's posing with a CT-41 hull model. They day before, we visited Keelung to get a feel for the port from which all our tugs were shipped.

Welcome back to the hemisphere, Howells.