When you think about the first steps in making a boat you probably don’t think about the word lofting, you probably think you just grab some wood and start cutting. This week we learned that this is not the case, there is a considerable amount that goes into the planning process which is the first step. Lofting is when you create a true to scale blueprint of your boat by drawing it in three viewpoints. You do this through a careful process of measurements and drawing.
You start with your paper copy and use your scale measurements to recreate lines in their true size through a grid system.
One your grid system is created you use your measurements as a coordinate system and mark your points to then be connected and make lines. For the curved lines, you use a thin, long, piece of wood and ice picks to hammer the small wood into the table to hold them into the shape you need. This gives you a perfectly curved shape to trace and complete your lofting, or life size blueprint.
This is a very important step in creating your boat because it will give you your exact measurements and outline of the boat. This will help you to see the exact shape of things and make sure that all your measurements are accurate when you move to cutting wood. At first the process seems daunting as your original copy has many lines in different directions and numbers all over, but once you understand the process it goes much smoother and makes sense to what each line represents.
One of the biggest challenges I faced was when you draw your bow (front) and stern (back) of the boat. This was more difficult than drawing the sides, because when your lines are all curved when you look at a boat from the front or the back and getting the measurements correct is crucial. In order to get nice smooth curves or as it was referred to, a “fare curve” you had to measure your height from the side view and your width from your top view. One both measurements were taken you had to again do a coordinate system and use the thin wooden pieces to create your curve. This was conceptually hard to understand what each point represented but become clearer as you kept going and our lines looked smoother the more lines we finished.
Overall, we learned so much about the process of lofting and what it means in the boatmaking world. We learned of the simple techniques that go a long way in making sure that your design works on paper and in the larger scale to be used in our next steps. There is a lot of technicalities that make such a huge difference in how your boat will turn out for example how being 1/8th inch off one place can make your boat 8 inches off in another. We learned so much and are beginning to see how much preparation truly goes into a boat because you even pick up your first piece of wood to cut.