Drawing Building Plans

[Charlie43]

For the majority of the years that humans have been building 'true boats', as opposed to 'rafts', they worked by eye and tradition, not from a set of builder's plans. But until you've built a boat or two or twenty, trying to jump in without a set of plans is a sure way to produce firewood, not an useble boat. So the boat you want to row, sail, paddle, or motor has to begin on paper or in a model, either of which can be considered “your plans”.

These days, plenty of free or low-cost marine CAD programs are available which backyard builders can use to draw their own building plans. How easy it will be depends on less on one's native intelligence and sense of design than the ability to specify and achieve objectives, no matter the task. Or as the late, great, boat designer, Yogi Berra once said,

“If you don't know where you're going, it's pretty hard to get there.”

What another's objective are is for them to decide. But these are the qualities I design for: 'light-weight', 'low-cost', 'ease of construction', 'fast', 'sweet', all of which are subjective, relative, and inter-dependent, but doable and achievable by them without formal training in marine architecture, because boats are just a box that floats (because it displaces water), a box that offers good service if it is properly sturdy, a box that moves easily and well if it is shapely.  

Marine design work ain't rocket science. If you can draw a good box, you can draw a good boat.

[MarkR]

Here are my thoughts.  If I wanted to draw my own boat and then build it, I might take a different path than what you have outlined here.  I have an initial hesitation - me, an old guy who has been designing building systems for a lifetime, but not boats - can design a better boat than someone who has designed them for a lifetime.  

I'll buy into the design software.  I can do that.  I'll buy into the fact that only I can know exactly the kind of boat that I want to build - with sufficient research.  How about a lifetime of very specialized knowledge?  How does that play?   Do I really want to build five boats to come up with a marginally successful design?  Not me!

I once had a good friend tell me, as I criticized my own design: "That's why they call it a practice."  The fact is: when you design, you practice.  You will fail.  You need to do that; own that.  If you don't fail, you are not taking chances.  You will never achieve anything exceptional.  For some of us, that's not enough.  We need exceptional.

So: For those who want exceptional, they will build from carefully selected plans and make that vessel exceptional with our craft.  That is enough.

So here's my alternate path:  If I were to make a plan, I would draw it, then make a scale model.  A model done to scale will perform exactly like a full size boat.  I can make twenty 1:12 models (or 1:6 for smaller boats) in the time it takes to build one full size boat.  It seems to me that the scale model approach is a way to condense the design & build cycle of refining a hull.

I'm interested in your thoughts on this approach.

[Charlie43]

Only some types of models (boats or anything else) scale easily and well. (Quantity can become a quality.) And being able to build a boat from a model is a gift from the gods very few are given. Herreshoff had it, but almost no one else ever before, or after, to his level of speed and unerringness. He got away with producing excellent boats from a few evenings of whittling. But almost no one else can.  

Second, there's a world of difference between a table of offset (a boat's platonic form), or even a set of line drawings, and what comes off the building frame.

Third, until a person draws boats, he/she lacks a means to understand and evaluate a set of drawings, nearly all of which are at best guesses, compromises, and full of fairing errors. The so-called "experts" draw plenty of bad boats. The only advantage of buying their plans is they are less likely to be worse than what a true amateur produces.

Fourth, a distinction has to be made between 'naval architecture' (where things like 'loading' really do have to be understood) and 'small boat design', where the goal is merely a shapely, efficient hull. The latter is within the means of anyone who has experience of using boats and is willing spend a few hundred hours at the drafting table and on the lofting floor.

Two other things are also going on here in my willingness to advocate that homebuilders draw their own boats and your reluctance: temperament (in the Meyers Briggs sense) and work history. By type, you value authority. By type, I don't. You were part of one design priesthood and are inclined to extend to other "designers" that same "professional respect" you felt was your due. I'm a "deck plate" guy who was expected to fix things for which there were no manuals nor established procedures. "Make it work. The tugs will be tying up in two hours, and the boat has to come off the dock".

Neither personality type nor approach to accomplishing design work is "right". I'm comfortable drawing what I build and building what I draw. Most people, due to the school system, have had their willingness to take risks beaten out of them.  I've got a grad degree from UC Berkeley, as well taught at several four-year colleges. So I know the ed game, and I also know how to subvert it. My fellow instructors hated me. But not a one of my students ever failed end of quarter exams in which no instructor graded his own students, nor did they ever get a 'D'. Why? Instilled, encouraged self-confidence, and practice, practice, practice.  

Choose the design path you're comfortable with.  

[MarkR]

It's my understanding that boat models are some of the more valuable when modeled accurately.  The process that I've read about - but not attempted, in all fairness - goes like this:  A boat is designed full scale.  It is then built at 1:10 or 1:12 or thereabouts.  Weight must be proportionally correct.  That model should then perform just like the full scale boat.   This has been documented many times over.

As to your assumptions about personality types, my Meyers Briggs has me way over on the assertive side of the scale.  Not a perfect 'submit to authority' guy, actually.  (Didn't vote for Trump.)  Authority has nothing to do with it.  

My hesitation to drawing my own boat is based upon my own experience at my own design discipline.  I was fairly competent at straightforward things in my twenties.  I thought I was good and was mostly OK in my thirties.  By my fifties, I WAS good.  By my mid-sixties, I was good AND nuanced.  I could nail it 95% of the time.  But never 100%.

That took a lifetime.  I'm still learning.

I figure if anyone is any good at designing boats, after a lifetime of work they likely know a lot more than I do.  Plus, I can read reviews of how these boats actually perform.  How complete the plans are.  How accurate.  

All I'm saying is most of us don't want to be boat designers.  We want to be boat builders.  Something we can handle without screwing it up too badly.

Cheers!  - Mark

[Charlie43]

"...most of us don't want to be boat designers.  We want to be boat builders."

Mark,

Unless the set of plans is perfect, and unless they are slavishly followed, a lot of what happens on the building frame is "design work" as lines get translated into materials. I prefer to own the whole process.

In fact, I'll go further. There's no 'small boat' designer (meaning, a boat I can pick up and carry), living or dead, with whom I'm not willing to compete and whom I think I couldn't beat in a design contest. That's not because I'm good. It's because they are so very bad.

Small boat builders, OTOH, are a whole 'nother matter. I'm a crap builder, know I'm a crap builder, and would flunk out first round in a workmanship contest. I've seen too many well-crafted boats --and not the boat show obscenities, which I despise-- to claim otherwise. But I know what I'm doing at the drafting table and on the lofting floor in my niche, which is light-weight, low-cost, easily-constructed, solo-user, car-toppable, beach-launchable, fly-fishing platforms meant for protected water that row comfortably and easily at 4 MPH.

That class of boats is barely a footnote in the field of naval architecture. But it's a toehold in the field of small boat design I don't hesitate to leverage when I critique any set of plans, none of which are as good as they should have been in terms of fairness of lines, shop constructability, and suitability for supposed purpose.

Yeah, after a few revisions based on builder/user feedback, the "designers" can generally get most things right. But any careful builder/thoughtful boat user will still find much he/she needs to change in a set of plans, so much so, the boat gets re-drawn. So then, whose design really is it? Certainly not the the person who sold the plans, who was mostly borrowing from 5,000 years of prior design work, however informally done, nor really, the last person at the drafting table, who is still at the mercy of materials and a builder.  

When should a would-be boat-builder buy his or her design work, and when should they attempt their own? The Buddhists have saying, "When the student is ready, the master will appear." And if that doesn't resonate, try this one, "The obstacle is the path."  I've been drawing boats for so long, I don't even remember why I began. Likely, it happened out of frustration with not finding "on the shelf" what I needed.

Charlie