Lofting Demystified

Lofting is the process of drawing a boat full size on the loft floor in order to create templates from the lines you lay down. These templates will then be used to cut out pieces of the boat. A table of offsets provides the dimensions required to measure up from a baseline, or across from the center line to plot the necessary point. 


Think of it this way: take an oblong bowl of spaghetti, cut it lengthwise, and use a faded, splotchy xerox of an old excel spreadsheet to plot each point that your knife touched. Put some nails in the floor at the points the splotchy graph indicated, bend a 20' long stick around it, and draw a curve. Then label all these noodles with strange, esoteric names, like "buttocks" and "forward perpendicular" and you pretty much have it. At the end of the day, when you can't stand up any more because your knees gave out, or you bought the local drug store clean out of white-out (cause erasing on white painted door skin is a bitch,)you look at your lines, and viola! It looks like a boat! No. It actually looks like a bowl of spaghetti with white-out stripes.


I have drawn rectilinear buildings for years, by hand, and in autocad. This business is just crazy. The concepts are the same, but keeping all the noodles straight in my brain is tough. It doesn't help that you can't see both ends of a noodle from one spot. It also doesn't help that you are dealing with a sixteenth of an inch tolerance over sixteen feet--especially when you are using a janky-ass plywood square some dude cut on a table saw and didn't bother to tell you was and eighth out in four feet. (Probably why i had so many white stripes in the first hour. I hate using crappy tools. If i ever loft a boat again, I'll have an 8' triangle milled at a steel fab shop.)


So far i have not done much in the boat drawing department to give boat building enthusiasts any faith in architects. I keep telling people that just because i have worked in architecture firms for years doesn't mean I'm GOOD at it. I keep telling myself its not about the drawing; its about learning how to draw the drawing. 


Tim said, "Oh, you don't EVER want to build the first boat you loft." Someone asked why.
"Don't worry. You'll see why." 


Maybe Monday will be be better, and I'll unravel the mystery of the noodle bowl.