Has anyone tried to loft a boat on a table? By which i mean "in miniature" by using centimeters and millimeters to scale it down. I guess i want to try to loft it on my kitchen table and not the garage as it is too cold to paint or kneel on the floor.
RSS
RE: lofting
» Submitted by Laszlo - Thu, 1/2/14 » 7:47 AM
Are you talking about traditional lofting - turning a table of offsets and a 3-view plan into developed panels?
That is certainly possible, especially with calculators, computers, etc. The only disadvantage, regardless of the actual tools you use, is that the "miniature" could hide some errors. That was one of the points of traditional lofting - to find and correct errors in the plans and offsets table.
And at some point, unless you're only building a model, you'll still have to transfer it to full-size wood panels.
What I'd suggest is to use a computer with the largest screen you can get hold of to to the actual development of the panels. A small screen would work, too, but it'd be easier with a big one. If you use one of the lofting programs out there you won't have to do any scaling or comversions at all. The program will generate the panel dimensions, and since it doesn't care what your numbers actually mean (cm vs. mm) you can get accurate unscaled results.
As far as marking the wood, I've built 2 boats now where I've brought the wood into the house for marking. All I needed was a few hours on the living room floor, no cutting, no sawdust so my wife was OK with that. She was actually sort of interested in the process. If you can do that, that'll get you past the heat problem.
For the actual cutting, I set up a table made from sawhorses and a sheet of plywood so that I wouldn't have to kneel on the garage floor.
Does this answer your questions?
Good luck,
Laszlo