A design student's shopping list

There may not be enough beer in Australia to sit and tallk over this subject

 

Brett - sorry - didn't mean to cast aspertions on your qualifications - hardly reasonable since I don't have any!!

and Gonzo - there's never enough beer!!

 

Tell ya what - I'll supply the beer, but the discussion is at my place... You guys bring the steaks.

 

Sounds good to me - Tassies 1/2 under water at the moment and it's only 13 degrees today (that's centigrade for all you backward types... )

 

We're at 22 deg and mostly fine. I hate this cold weather..

 

What about paper? Which kind do you guys prefer?

 

Anything that dosen't stretch / shrink!
Drafting film seems to work quite well - though you have to use special leads if you don't want a smudgy drawing. They say vellum or mylar are best - though I've never tried them.
Generally I use a fine nip, heavy grade translucent drafting 'paper'.
If I ever get round to it, I'm planning on building a giant light box to do all my drawing on - then I won't need to use the films or tracing paper at all....

 

The July, 1995 issue of Woodenboat had an article on Nigel iren's lugger "Roxane." He's the designer of some beautiful "contemporary traditional" boats, along with some of the coolest state-of-the art composite racing trimarans.

The article said his design method started with an initial hand-drawn or computer lines plan, which he used as a guide for carving a wood hull model. When that was to his liking, he scaled sections of the model, dumped 'em back into the computer and faired the hull to final tolerances. Don't know if that's still his process, but it seems like a great blend of techniques.

I agree with Will Allision if you can draw a boat on the board, you can loft a boat on the floor. But if you fair the boat on the computer and print sections templates out full size, there's no reason to loft the boat. That's why you used the computer in the first place. And who wants to run through umpteen iterations of hydrostatics or lines revisions with a pencil, eraser, and planimeter. Give me the option to Save As and move onto the next version with a mouse click any day.

 

The problem with computer designs is that you can't see them full size. Tweaking a line half an inch in twenty feet makes the difference between an OK and a beautiful boat. Also, the perspective changes the way the boat looks. That is, a small drawing does not scale up to our eyes. Perspective distorts lines differently according to their scale.