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~ 

Lofty Lofting

What a week. School is really starting to kick in, even more reason I need a boat, and soon!

Towards the end of this week I hope to begin the lofting (still trying to decide which type of plywood I want to sell my unborn firstborn male child for.) Traditionally, lofting was done directly on the floor of a boat shop, unless of course they wanted to save the pattern so that they could recreate this boat again and again. In this case it would would be done on some plywood type material. This way I can reuse it again for building another dory or maybe just for hanging on my wall (or I can use it to make a nautical themed beer pong table (or I can just stop messing around with ping pong balls and drink the beer directly)). Whatever the case may be, I am going to loft on the plywood.

Now, a Banks Dory has been built so many times that some people I talk to say I shouldn't even bother lofting it. There have been a million books so why waste my time? I am choosing to loft because I am going to use the finished product and "pick-up" my lines directly from it. Picking up lines refers to using your lofted boat plan almost as a template to guide you in cutting out your pieces. I am also choosing to loft because the great John Gardener told me so in his dory bible "The Dory Book," and I dare not incur the wrath of John Gardener. John Gardener is to Dories is what Bobby Fischer is to chess. You just don't second guess the guy.

So, I'll begin by purchasing two 4'x 8' pieces of plywood and some 2"x 4"s as support. I would like to bolt the plywood to the 2"x 4"s that way I can assemble and disassemble and move them around easier. We'll see how my attention span is when it comes time for that though, I bet I'll just nail that sucker (and then probably wish I bolted it later, ha!)

I originally intended to put a cool picture I saw the other day of some salty dudes lofting a boat probably in the late 1800's. However, I could not find the picture so I chose to tell you this miserable story instead. These days everybody gets a lot of grief for how easy we have it compared to the past. Like in my case, I will be building this boat with power tools, so I guess I can't really say it is being built traditionally. I mean I guess the old-timers had it a lot harder right? You know what, they may have not had power tools but they also didn't have things like youtube, facebook, wikipedia, or google to ruin their lives and sidetrack them for like three hours. I innocently decided to go search for that picture, and not only did I not find it, but I looked at ebay, craiglist, and wooden boat forum. See all those blue hyperlinks? It's like walking through a mine field, except instead of being blown up by a mine, you get derailed and end up spending an hour looking at the freaks that crawl around Wal-Mart (People of Wal-Mart, click it, I dare you.) Did you click it? Did you spend at least twenty minutes feeling nauseous? Anyways, I digress, on with the boat!

Once, I lay out the plywood and check to make sure both the pieces are not distorted or affected in any way, I can start the process. Firstly, make a baseline.
 ***Disclaimer*** All line's plans and offset tables are different. Some are drawn with a baseline, some use a waterline as the point of reference, some elevate the true bottom above the baseline, yada, yada, yada. (but, you yada yadad over the best part! No, I mentioned the bisque... (10 points to who can name where that comes from!))***Disclaimer***
So it is up to you to read your plans carefully. Some find it helpful to do a 'mini-lofting' on a piece of graph paper (that's what I did.) It allows you to work out all the kinks on a piece of paper instead of on your expensive plywood. Then, if you want to go even further, you can build a balsa wood model to check your accuracy even further.

Here is a picture of my 'mini' lofting and the start of my model:

You can see the profile view (side), and the half-breadth view(expanded to full-breadth). The start of the model is sitting directly on the full-breadth view showing that the plan directly corresponds with the model.

The way I started this was with my table of offsets. Here is the exact plan I am using:

This one page contains the entire plan for the boat. It's like the Rosetta Stone, in order to understand the hieroglyphics, you gotta know your Greek. Well in this case, numbers are your Greek and everything else is that jumbled mess of hieroglyphs. Notice in the bottom right hand corner. There is your offset table. As long as you know your numbers, you can plot the lines. The offsets are a certain distance from a certain reference point which will give you a certain location of a point in the boat. I could delve very deeply into this, but it's about 1:30 a.m. where I'm at and I just got done doing a bunch of homework. Alas, I promise I will, at another time, cover every aspect, that's a good reason for you to keep coming back!

So exciting, exciting! Sometimes the planning part can be very tedious. That's how it was when I was in the Marines. Planning just downright made you want to pull your hair out. But, the success of a mission relies on the planning, so it is a necessary evil. And, it's not all that bad, you get a lot of daydreaming in.

When you start to get stressed out, you just gotta find something to motivate you. This dory picture should keep me motivated for quite some time:

Take that wave!

I could honestly write a million captions for that picture. I don't think they are rowing, it appears they are blasting off into space.

Fair winds, strong rum, sharp knives,

Brett