My Dory Model is Ready to Hit the Runway!

Aaaarrrggghhhhh! Sunday is National Talk Like a Pirate Day so I hope y'all are ready to growl and spit your sentences at people all day long. But if you can't talk like a pirate, just use a lot more profanity and you're covered.

Ok so tonight I finished the main phase of my boat model, WOOT!

Ain't she a beauty? No, She's not? How dare you! If you were one of those people who thought "Man, that model is uglier than a bridge troll who has been beaten with a bag of hot nickels..." then you are correct. This model is ugly. Maybe one day when I am 200 years old, retired and am looking for any reason to ignore my wife, I can create a spectacular replica. Instead I am 26, have the attention span of a field mouse, and am in a room filled with way too many shiny objects, so for me to accomplish this I deserve something along the lines of a Nobel Prize (Hey they have been handing them out for nothing the last few decades, why not me?) BUT, that is the point. This model IS ugly. It isn't built for beauty, it's a functional model. 

Functional you might ask? How are these functional? Well, I'm gonna give you a list just on the things it has helped me with:

1. Visualize my offsets
2. Made sure they were correct
3. Checked all around measurements to verify they are correct (Even John Gardner recommends checking well-known boat plans)
4. Provides a way to make a reasonably close estimate for the length of all your strakes from garboard to sheer (more on that later)
5. Allows you to ensure frames match the beveling on the rockered bottom to better receive the garboard
6. Helps with the concept of the bevel at both the stem and transom
7. Provided a small scale lofting and construction operation so that I can address a lot of logistical issues (I would rather screw up the balsa wood than the white pine or oak)
8. Kept my sanity (or made it worse, meh)
9. Etc.

There are many many, many, many more benefits than just this. Models are even greater help with a boat that has a very curvaceous bottom (ooh la la). In fact, shipwrights used to make wooden models 1:8 scale and would pull the waterlines off of it to use in the construction. Making a model was the great grand daddy of CAD (computer aided design) programs. 

Notice on my model, on what should be the frames, I have made them a solid piece all the way across. I did this for structural reasons and so when my cat (soon to be a ship's cat!) bats it off the table, it won't break as easily. It also really helps visualize what the boat will look like. To be honest, mine now has me worried that the 4th station lines are incorrect because there is not a "fair" curve between everything. This is a great example of how it helped me solve a large-scale problem. So, I will go back, check and recheck my numbers, measurements, and all else to find out where the problem is. Better to do it with balsa wood and a hobby knife than white pine and a hand saw...

Ok, no more model talk.

I would like you to check out this guy's website: The Unlikely Boat Builder

This dude has a pretty cool gig going on. He one day just decided to start building boats and he had zero experience. This obviously didn't matter because he has done some really awesome things. This is providing some great info for me and some extra motivation. 

Thanks for stopping in gulls and buoys (yuk yuk, nautical joke hurrah!)

If you like what you see, become a follower, leave a comment, post a link to this site somewhere, tell some friends, whatever you can do to help with the revolution of the Neptune Nation...

Fair winds, strong rum, sharp knives, dry socks,

~Brett~