Laying Down

Our title would at first glance appear to suggest a confusion of bad grammar and bad taste. In truth it is an old, proper, and excellent def­inition of the first task in the art and craft of boatbuilding: the lofting process. In simple terms, the operation consists of drawing ("lay­ing down") an accurate, full-sized picture on the floor, from which patterns are "taken off." The process is neither mysterious nor difficult, but there are some simple and essential truths. (In the learning process, there are one or two shocking truths, as well!) When I was very young I held most naval architects in awe, and considered myself very smart indeed to have mastered the mechanics of lofting those sacred and untouchable draw­ings-waterlines, buttocks, magnificent diag­onals, finally the body plan-and I crawled reverent miles on hands and knees, correcting tiny (and not-so-tiny) errors.committed by men who had mastered the greatest and most thrill­ing of all arts: yacht design. It was an honor and a privilege to be chosen as one who would, however inadequately, bring this vision to being in wood, metal, paint, and whatever else the specifications called for (most of these items bought by the Designer at one-third off, and furnished to me, or our common victim, the Owner, at list price, as I finally learned)-and it was wonderful. Time passed, my work improved, my knees and my faith became worn and battered, and I discovered a shocking truth: Practically anyone who can read the figures on a yardstick can lay down a body plan and a profile; and that's all you need to lay down, anyway. If the designer howls betrayal for some reason, there are two suggestions you can make about that set of lines and offsets. The polite one is that he take them back to his drawing board and correct them himself. If he can't develop a curved tran­som, he shouldn't expect you to do it for him. If he says you can't get the angles for the stem rabbet from the scale drawing, he needs further education. And finally, if this lofting were half as difficult as you have been led to suspect, some of us old pros would still be chopping dugouts out of tree trunks, and managing to make that look like quite a mystery, too. So let's lay down what is strictly necessary, and no more; build a set of molds; make two ­dimensional patterns of stem, sternpost, tail feather (the late Sam Crocker's term for the keel-of-the-counter, usually called the horn timber), and transom knee; and make the pat­tern for the ballast-shoe casting. This last item is the only difficult one of the four, and will be treated separately and at length later. The basic grid For this laying-down business you need a reasonably smooth floor, slightly longer than the boat and slightly wider than the total of maximum draft plus greatest freeboard-in the case of our example, 10 by 40 feet. You can manage on half this length or even less, but you'll have some confusion of lines-over-lines to cope with. If the floor is good enough, and the owners don't object, give it a coat of flat white paint, and work directly on that. If it's the floor of your living room, or as rough as my shop floor, cover it with light-colored sheath­ing paper (40 inches wide, 500 square feet to the roll, available at any lumberyard), which you spread out and let lie for 24 hours before you stretch and tack (or tape) it in place. Don