Model Building

A month or so ago I got plans for the boat I am building.  It is recommended that one build a model, as questions arise during the process, and it's much easier to figure things out and make mistakes at a small scale with cheap materials.  I picked up some poster board and scrounged up some balsa would and started building.

It was surprising how long it took to put the hull together.  There isn't much time difference between marking things out at 1/10 scale as compared to full scale.  In fact, due to having to make the conversions (what's 1/10 of 11 & 5/16?) and then trying to measure things out as accurately as possible it took many hours just to cut the hull panels.  Since errors are magnified by a factor of ten, even things like a pencil line width become important.  A 0.7mm pencil line at 1/10 scale has a relative width of 7mm of over 1/4"

The designer is a Kiwi, and thus drew the original plans in metric.  I opted for the imperial dimensioned plans due to our inability to convert to a more sensible system resulting in all commonly available measuring equipment being in imperial units.  It made conversion a pain.  Convert 100mm to 1/10 scale?  No problem. Convert the equivalent imperial measurement of 3 & 15/16"?  That requires a calculator. Luckily I have calipers that measures in 10ths, hundredths, and thousandths of an inch so I didn't have to convert back to 16ths.  Then. when you get into measurements with feet, it gets even more ridiculous.  Some of the measurements are in eighths or quarters, so I had to be careful to make sure I wasn't automatically treating everything as a 16th. Constantly rechecking calculations and measurements to make sure I wasn't making a mistake burned up a lot of time.  I also ran into the situation where the sum of two measurements did not add up to the sum indicated on the plan, but was short by 1/16th of an inch.  I contact the designer through the wooden boat forum and my evening work managed to coincide with his morning work so I had a reply in about 5 minutes.  Yay, internet!  As I had suspected, it was a round-off error, where 32nds got rounded down.  He assured me that level of precision just isn't worth worrying about, but I noted it in the plans anyway.  The issue came up a few more times, but knowing what to look for made it easy to deal with.

After completing the hull, the rest went fairly quick, because working balsa wood at model scale is a lot quicker than shaping wood at full size.  I didn't bother to build everything, because doing things like building a rudder and tiller at this scale don't really tell you  whole lot, and the fit isn't as critical as they are bolt on components vs. having to integrate with other shapes to form a strong, watertight hull.

Behold the awesomeness!  Note:  Beaker is approximately 6 feet tall, counting hair.