The project started when Joe Kranik, a member of the OBC and also IT Manager at LCHS, informed our club that Catholic High was going to rebuild the football stadium. It was suggested that we may be able to procure the bleacher seats and use them to build maintenance free boat docks for our club.
At a regular monthly meeting in February, a proposal was put forth by Joe Kranik and Gerry Gammache ‘70, that a six-man committee be formed to look at various designs. The committee dove head first into the project, reviewed several designs and settled on one that incorporated the framework and working deck of the Docks as being built almost exclusively out of the bleacher extrusions.
Machined Products Company volunteered their facilities to clean, prep, cut, fit, and weld the docks. Along with a large crew headed up by John Mahoney ‘84, work started near mid March and fabrication was completed by end of April. In May, the regular membership all joined in, partially supervised by Joy Troy ‘73, and completed assembly of floats and hardware, and The OBC successfully floated its first dock...and the next 19!
“It was truly a joy to work on this project” said Gerry Gammache, president of Machined Products. “Almost everyone involved, had never had extensive experience in a machine shop environment, let alone incorporate the skills necessary to put this together. After 100’s of man hours, the results were phenomenal. The Quality of the work that was done was almost equal to what you would expect of a professional fabricator. This is a credit to the enthusiasm and industrious nature of the team that was put together. The smile on everyone’s face was all the evidence needed to realize they had all done a great job.”