Finally some Lofting!

This sailboat is really slow getting started. I'm having at tough time finding any air dried white oak planks to build the frames, and it's taking forever just to get the frames onto a lofting board.

Well I finally got that done today. First, I finished building those tiny sawhorses and moved the strongback out to the sidewalk where I will be building this boat. I picked this location because I can get a trailer next to this spot when it's time to roll the boat from being a hull upsidedown, to go right-side up and start building the top.

I think this will work

The lofting board that I picked up was just a 3/8" thick piece of plywood. This is really too thin, so I added some stiffeners on the bottom before painting the whole thing. I have to move this thing around by myself so I didn't want it to get too heavy, and I have to move it out to the strongback every time I want to draw. So now I have the setup in place, I have my plans printed out, and I have the board ready to draw.

My first frame is drawn!

Laying out the left side

And laying out the right side

Initial drawing of the stem

These drawings are to the outside of the frame. The plans were missing one measurement, so I had to guess and measure and do some math to get a fair line. I hope I got it right, that was for frame #2, so if I'm wrong the sheer line will have a serious kink in it - so let's hope I'm not wrong.

After I got it this far in the process, I can start to really see the size of the boat. They all say it's important to build your boat, not just stick to the plans because that's what that designer wants you to do. So now I can sit with these drawings and decide how I want to build it. Is this really the frameset that I want to use for my boat?

I made a few changes today and finalized the frame layout. First, the boat seemed a bit shallow for the bench seating I wanted to put in the inside of the hull. So I extended the top of the frames by 5" to make the sides a bit taller. That should help get me the seating I need. Also I decided that instead of a hard chine I wanted rounded corners, so I drew those onto the frames as well. I had to grade the corners in a way that would allow the plywood to bend that way, so it also affects the type of plywood application that I use to build the hull. When it's all said and done I used a sharpie to bring the lines home.

That's my boat!

Frames are number (L to R) 3, 1, 5, 4, 2

The stem also got extended 5"

That's my boat! I think I'm going to use 3mm okume plywood to handle that curve, and take up to 3 layers of it to make it durable. That's called cold molding. I might be able to get 4mm plywood to bend like that and use 2 layers, not sure yet. But I'm ready to start building frames now!!