BYYB Forums

Wow! I havent been following this in a little while but how educational I plan to cast some lead as movable ballast at some point using old tire weights. this topic is so great thank you so much for sharing this.

Brian.

Timo on your second attempt, have you given thought to setting threaded rods in the lead keel during the pour, for bolting it to the wooden part? I would think it might hold well, and be easier that drilling through the lead. I drilled my wood keel to install threaded rod for extra strength, and had to be careful to drill them straight.

Greg

But think about the accuracy needed when drilling the holes in deadwood to make them match the bolts already attached in the lead! And if the bolts are not parallel it is not possible to slide them into any holes.

I prefer drilling afterwards when I can put the two pieces together and drill through both of them.

I have worked all the night last week picking the offsets from the plans and making a check with my PC. There´s a lot of numbers and a lot of conversions from the original inches and fractions into millimeters. Paul has done a good job in conversions but still I found a couple of missing figures and a few slips.



Anyway, last night I had lines that looked fair on the screen and was ready to start full scale this morning.

My problem was the room: it was shorter than my LOD! So I had to juggle the masonites, the lines plans and everything until I found a way to fit everything. First I printed the drawings in 1:20 scale and made pieces of paper into the size of the masonite boards. Then I made the puzzle on my kitchen table first and started with the actual boards only after that. The baseline has to be slightly diagonal and even so it was a tight fit, I even had to utilize the small indent at the doorway!



But after working for three hours I had produced one straight line, 6 meters long.


"Not very efficient, is it" was the encouraging comment of SWMBO when I returned home, tired and starving  :o
Tomorrow I will continue and hopefully make some real progress after having lined up my lofting floor today.

To those who wonder how I am going to build the boat if the shop is not big enough for lofting I can tell that this workshop is only used for lofting, building the moulds and some components. The assembly of the real boat is going to happen in the workshop of the yacht club. But I have all the tools here and I am paying the lease anyway. The club shop will cost me extra so I will use it only for the period I will need the space.

I have thought of making the moulds, transom, stem, parts of deadwood, rudder etc first. I could even make the masts and spars as well before starting the planking. Basically everything that can be made based on the plans and doesn´t need the actual hull to take measures from can be prefabricated. This will also make the build more rewarding when I don´t need to stop working with the actual boat to make the rudder for example. Instead, I can just assemble those components and see the progress all the time. 

I always start a boat in the fall or winter building the "parts" like spars etc. before starting the actual boat hull.  I hate getting the hull finished then having to spend time building the parts, when I could be sailing.

Not very much time for the boat project, but some progress made. I forgot the fact that the sheer is going to be ~70mm higher than original and the raking transom means more length. It was a REALLY close call to have the lofting inside my lofting floor  :



As you can see I had reserved some space outside the T station, but when the raised sheer and transom where connected it was more than valuable.

The stem is using all the space there is in the other end of the room. S is the original stem and S+ is where the stem will be after extending it to the higher sheer.

Waterlines and diagonals will be in different sides of the baseline at the door and stem/sheer of the profile will meet at the marks to the left.

As you can see, I am building the absolutely biggest boat I can ;D

I edited the title of the thread since this is not the start anymore, we are moving  8)

Since my lofting floor is 30cm (one foot) thick bare concrete I had to invent some techniques of my own. I didn´t want to buy plywood to cover it all but wanted to get away with lighter and cheaper masonite instead. But any nails won't hold in the 3mm masonite alone  So I came up with these:


Small pieces of plywood with a couple of hardened steel nails. Setting a corner of the plywood at the measured location on my floor I can bend my battens and the two nails hold enough when the plywood keeps the nails upright. Worked like a charm. I also used some weighs like extra lead from the casting experiment or sledgehammers without handles to clamp the battens.


Some misplaced, misread or mismarked points caused a little headscratching:


But everything is now sorted out, even the transom panel developed. Next step is to drive to the lumberyard on Tuesday and get material for the moulds.

Yep, it appears you have it in hand. Lofting is a time honored method and has several benefits not immediately seen by the novice. For example Timo found an unfair spot at station 6, which I was aware of, but thought I'd fixed. He sprung a few more diagonals and sorted it out.

Other benefits would be the absolute intimacy you get with the shapes used in the hull. This can come in handy later in the build when you cut something, say a station mold or frame element. You might notice something isn't right and go back and check your measurements. I've done this countless times, just on a whim or feeling something just doesn't "feel" right, only to find out I'd mis-measured or mis-marked something. I knew it wasn't right because of the intimate knowledge of the hull shapes from the lofting process.

With a full size lofting you can make full size templates and mock ups. On a recent build, I was debating an interior furniture arrangement with the client. He wanted one thing and I was pushing for something else. I made a full size cardboard mock up of both interiors. The client came over and sat inside each. Okay he actually sat on a 5 gallon bucket under the cardboard, but he got the idea and went with my recommendations, once he could "see" what was going on.

You can pick up bevels for the stem, planking and any other element on the boat from the lofting. You can figure out precisely how big or long a piece of lumber you need for a specific part. You have no idea how many times I've grabbed a handful of "sticks" from a lumber pile and walked over to a lofting and placed each piece on it. "Nope, that don't fit, not this one, yep, this will work" and then pick up dead bang accurate dimensions, cut the part to fit and install.

Yep, lofting is a more then an old school way of doing things. It's a tool that should be useful on most builds. Unfortunately, many designers don't include offsets or lines drawings anymore in their plans. I guess I'm old school too, because all my plans come with both.

This pile needs to be converted into station moulds.



Note the moaning chairs  ;D  I have reserved several for visiting colleaques 8)

I enjoy mold building, you really get a feel for the shapes used in the boat.

Remember, with stations 1 through 4, the mold fall on the forward side of the station line, 6 through 8 aft of the station line and 5 technically should be forward of the line, but it could be done either way.

Visiting colleague chairs shouldn't be as comfortable as those appear to be. They should be like fast food restaurant chairs and good for 15 minutes at best, so you can get back to work undisturbed.