Lofting!

Lofting has been and gone.

It took two days to loft the boat and it was all very straight forward.

I only needed to make a few minor adjustments to stations 1, 4 and 7. Everything else faired in quite well.

I learnt to start with a heavy batten to draw in the keel and sheer profile, and then thickness it down for the sharper curves of the waterlines, then make it thinner again for the buttocks. I also had a few thinner battens for drawing in the body sections and stems.

I also learnt not to use recycled Oregon for a batten, the batten broke twice on old nail holes.

It was a quick fix with the electric plane, block plane and some polyurethane glue. The glue goes off in a few hours and is very easy to use.

If anyone wants to learn more about lofting I would greatly encourage the purchase of Chapelle's 'Boatbuilding'. The best way to practice is to find some old plans with offsets and scale then down to fit on an A1 sheet. You are simply lofting the boat at a smaller scale.