| Here's something that I really enjoyed doing. This one was for me. I'd been wanting to build this boat, a 22 footer which I had found in a 1935 magazine entitled, 20 Boats You Can Build. It was published by Popular Mechanics. Having never built a boat before, I thought I'd build a model first. That way the materials are cheaper, much less space needed, and of course less time. Also, the inevitable "OOPS" is reduced to a small size. I decided to build it 1/6 scale which gave me a model a little under 4 feet in length. So I set about making scale size lumber and built the model exactly as the full size boat would have been built. I lofted out the offsets, bent fair curves with a scale size batton, and laid down the lines for my micro yacht. I'd read some text about boat building so it was really enjoyable to apply what I had learned to make a three dimensional piece out of a bunch of numbers in an old magazine. If the old saying "a picture is worth a thousand words" is true, then the not so old saying "a model is worth a thousand pictures" is certainly true as well. You learn a lot from a scale model. The first thing I recall learning is that this boat would only have had about five and a half feet of head room. I certainly would not have enjoyed discovering that little fact after building the full size boat! bw |
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