A Shipwright in Training

First, some administrative business. I’ve posted pics of what the normal toolbox handle looks like in that post, as well as the various joints we made in the first week in that post. Ok, off we go.

Yesterday we began working with actual boats, at last!! 18 of us have been divided up into 4 groups to work on 4 Beetle cats. The task is to level the boats and “take the lines off” of them. What that means is that we measure the shape of the hull in a very precise way and then transfer that information to a series of 2-dimensional, full-sized, drawings of the boat. The process of drawing a boat full sized is called Lofting.

Here’s the full size boat we’re lofting:

Here’s the boat the 2nd years are lofting (a Herreshoff 12 1/2… a wonderful boat)

The framing around the boat is used to both stabilize the boat (so that it stays level and doesn’t move while you draw it) and to make a flat surface to draw on.

Our setup is a bit different since our boat is upside down. See, on our boat, we have this flat surface to draw on that looks like a little bridge over the boat.

Here are Sam and Matthew about to put red paper on the flat surface we’ver built. They will then use a pointy stick laid against the paper and touching the boat to measure the distance from our little frame to each point along the hull that the stick touches. We record the angle of the stick and how far it is from the boat on the paper. We then take that paper off the flat surface, lay it on a grid that we’ve drawn on floor, and use the stick and paper to recreate the exact locations of those points we just measured on the boat. This gives a series of little points.

Here’s Sam using the pointy stick to measure the boat. He’ll trace the angle of his stick on the paper and make a little mark on both the stick and paper to record how far the stick had to go to reach that point on the boat.

Here’s Jason with that piece of paper now taped to the grid we’ve drawn on the floor. He takes the stick that Sam used to measure the boat, lines it up on the paper just where Sam had it, and then makes a mark on the floor at the end of the stick.

It’s very precise work. When you get the marks on your lofting floor, you then tap nails into them, and lay a flexible strip of wood (a batten) across the nails to get a nice smooth line. That line is an exact replica of the shape of the hull at one particular section.

Essentially we’re taking full-size cross sections of the hull at various locations. When this part is done, we’ll use this information to draw the entire boat from the top, the side and the front and back. These drawings will give us all the information we need to actually build the boat.

We got a lot done today, it’s been a good day.

I love coming in to class. When I get home, I read about this stuff some more and it almost makes my head explode. But in a good way. In the morning, I’m totally psyched to come in and do it all again. If grad school had been this fun I would have graduated in 3 years.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 19th, 2006 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Classes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.