YDS Drafting

Hi All -

For those of you involved or familiar with the YDS course...Does the program explain and prepare you for the amount of drafting involved or would you recommend a separate drawing course be taken at, say, a local tech college?

I appreciate any info...

Thanks
Dan

 

Dan,

I am not familiar with the YDS course, so I cannot advise on what drafting detail they might go through. If it is a correspondence course, I would bet that the instruction is nil. If it is a residence course where you have continuous contact with the instructors, then you might get some more guidance.

In my experience, most designers do not know how to draw well. I take great pride in my drawings, both by hand and with AutoCad. If you are a good designer by hand, you can be a good designer with the computer. But if you are a sloppy designer by hand, you will be a sloppy designer with the computer. It is always easier to build a boat with good, clear, well-crafted drawings than it is with sloppy drawings.

So my advice would be, take a drafting course at a technical college just as a precaution. You'll be a lot better off with that background as you go into the YDS course.

Eric

 

Drafting At Westlawn

Hi Eric:

I can’t speak for other distance-learning schools, but Westlawn does give instruction in drafting. In fact, Westlawn has an entire section dedicated to drafting and many additional reference notes on both manual and CAD drafting. A great deal of manual and CAD drafting is required to complete the course, and work is graded and corrected on the quality of the drafting and presentation as well as on technical content.

Cheers,
Dave

Dave Gerr
Director
Westlawn Institute of Marine Technology
http://www.westlawn.org/

 

Yacht Design School Director

At YDS we put a great deal of emphasis on teaching drafting. We do not restrict this to the lessons specifically on drafting. All drawings submitted will have suggustions on improving drafting along with any other suggestions and corrections so really drafting instruction continues throughout the whole program. We have found that we've been effective enough at this so that our students tend to get "snapped up" long before they complete the course by design firms that need good draftsmen badly. It would be a rare person who got beyond lesson 10 without being offered a job for this reason. I would definitely NOT recommend taking a non-marine drafting course. Marine drafting is highly dependent upon the client feeling an emotional attachement to the work he or she is paying for. Therefore it tends to be extremely pictorial. Drafting courses at trade schools tend to be thinking in terms of teaching you the type of drawing a housing contractor or machinist would want to work from. They don't care if the drawing is pictorial and certainly don't want to feel that any extra time was put in to make it so. On the other hand in today's market even the custom boat builder is generally in the business because of a love of boats and has more business offered them than they can take. They will tend to choose which projects to bid on by which drawings they really love. All this means that I would stick to the instruction we give. We often spend hours just writing drafting suggestions on the students drawings for one lesson. Please email me if more response is wanted. I'm afraid both our design firm and YDS are very busy and we cannot monitor the forums properly. However we are eager to provide any information that anyone needs or offer an opinion in any forum if anybody wants us to.

Sincerely,
Tom MacNaughton
Yacht Design School Director
www.macnaughtongroup.com

 

drafting

SometimesI think mcnaughton spends too much time on the drafting aspect. IE. Steaming cups of coffee.

 

I Just received my first module kit last week from Westlawn, and found to my mild surprise that all work in Mod 1 now has to be done without CAD, only manual drafting!

Once past the first shock, I am now looking forward to digging my old pens out again. Should be really nice, after having spent the past dozen of years on the day job, in front of a monitor to return to the analogue world and get a FEEL for something

 

Drafting

Hi Eric,
You said you were not familiar with Mcnautons methods. I am one of their students. Sometimes I feel their emphasis on drafting is too much.! I don't need to know how to draw a steaming cup of coffee.
In other threads I have seen you are a proponent of carbon fiber masts.
I am currently trying to design a 34' version of Nigel Irens "Roxane".
I live in the northeast, Maine, Wondering if you could suggest a reputable manufacturer designer for the rig.
chandler

 

Drafting

If you can't draw by hand I don't think you have the right to draw by computer.

 

Chandler,

Talk to Ted Van Dusen at Composite Engineering in Concord, MA. Phone (978) 371-3132, ext. 27. They built Project Amazon's and Wobegone Daze's rig for me, also Saint Barbara being built now in Michigan. Other builders that could do it would be GMT Composites in Bristol, RI (401) 253-8802--talk to David Schwartz; or Composite Solutions in Hingham, MA (781) 335-4650--talk to Barry Steinberg. Composite Solutions would need a laminate schedule from you, but the other two could do the laminate schedules themselves.

As for drafting, I personally believe that you can never get enough instruction in drafting. I worked college summers and vacations in a drafting office at Eastern Michigan University (my father was president there), and so I had a lot of practice and instruction from the architect and other designers there. I learned a lot, and actually wish I had taken drawing courses to tune my hand to sketching better. Then when I went into business for myself, I discovered to my surprise that yacht designers in general DO NOT LIKE TO DRAW!!! And their work shows it. There are very few designers who can draw well and make a simple boat profile look like a work of art. So don't feel too burdened by going through the exercises--if you can draw well, you will be way ahead of the game.

Eric

 

I was also a bit surprised when I discoverd that the MacNaughton school expect all excercises to be hand drawn. But I agree that the ability to draw by hand is more fundamental than to make a nice hull in a computer program. I remember an inteview with Knud Reimers where he said that the most important key to success was the ability to make sketches while he was talking to the client.

 

Yds

Just wondering how you are doing at YDS..are you still happy with it?

 

I find a big difference between the quality of small boat & yacht drawings verses world of shipbuilding or larger commercial vessels. For the most part the designers of yachts and small vessels produce working drawings that are much less than adequate.
I feel like the standards of schools (in terms of marine drafting) such as Westlawn have a way to go on on steel or aluminum hulls anyway. Bad drawings seem to be the norm these days.

 

It is worth noting that there are really three distinct aspects of drafting, making neat, good looking drawings, (including good lettering and line weight control, so this is mainly for hand drawing), making drawings that are well organized, easy to follow and complete, and making drawings that comply well to drafting standards (ANSI Y14, for example, and revision control). Obviously they are related. The latter two are also applicable to CAD, even if you are doing 3D modeling, and are frequently where I see problems. Technical training or a job in a real commercial firm will take care of these issues.

As to hand lettering, either try to find someone who does architectural lettering with a vertical straightedge, or look for a book on lettering for architects. This is an easy-to-learn technique and looks nice.

 

Barry,
Thanks for your reply but we get many drawings from "real commercial firms" and most of them are terrible in regards to all 3 aspects you mention. First and foremost, the design itself usually disregards structural continuity. Secondly the drawings themself are poorly organized, omit key views and working dimensions. Thirdly, the draftsmanship is usually pretty bad. Repeating typical information over and over also bogs down the drawings with too much redundant info while omitting more important imformation.
My first test is looking for arrowheads that symbolize the termination of members on a deck structural plan. Do this, open a design drawing and look at the deck strutural plan and see if all of the members have symbols to denote where they stop and start. Most drawings fail this simple test. What this means is that the designer was unable to communicate this to the loftsman and or builder, so how are they supposed to know it.
Having designed, lofted or worked over 3000 metal hulls I am in a good position to know good design drawings from bad. The average set of drawings that I see is from "OK" to very bad.
I am writing a technical paper on Marine Drafting Practises that I hope to be finished with in the next few months. Not that I am saying I am an expert, but I will say that their is not much competition out there, especially in the small boat world. I check structural drawings for a living and poor drawings give me a lot to do so I guess I shouldn't complain!
If designers held to a few basic rules they could straighten up their designs and working drawings. I have 24 years of solid experience in drafting design, checking and lofting and I can tell you that the CAD drawings of today are much worse in every way than what was done manually years ago.

 

Also, these drawings I am speaking of are a long way from meeting ANSI standards or standards of any kind.