Lofting

So we have moved on now from drafting to lofting. Lofting is something where you draft your boat again, but in real scale. To do this we have cleared our workspace of all our benches, stapled plywood to the floor and painted them white.

Next we take our drafts and do them all over again, in pairs, but to the actual scale of the boat. Its pretty cool to see this boat take shape, as lines develop all over the floor. It was helpful to do the drafting first, to begin to get a handle on how it works, as the drafts show multiple angles overlaid on one another. This time its a little easier. It also helps that I have a partner who understands things better than I do, has done some woodworking in the past, and has a bit more acumen with things I struggle with, like getting correct measurements, drawing clean lines, and general understanding. He's a good one to learn from. Marc is his name, a young man from Tacoma. I'll try to take a picture of him, as he is my bench mate as well. Kind of funny, he used to have a screen printing business back in Tacoma. Gave it up to come out to boat school. You hear this a lot from people there, giving up whatever they had been doing, to give this wackiness a try. One guy was a cardiologist. A woman in my class was an archeologist, fluent in French too it seems. People from the IT world. Many transients, people who have been traveling around, working on fishing boats in Alaska and what not. Mostly they just remind me of people who don't fit in easily, accept with one another. Bill Hicks called them the 'People who hate People Party'. They are smart, funny and borderline criminal. My kind of people really.

Anyhow, here is the lofting floor. Its also my class' work space. It is usually filled with about eight work benches or so, but has been cleared out for these purposes. I'll try to get another picture with everyone on their hands and knees working, and one where you might actually be able to see the lines we are drawing out.

Also, in Seattle, there is a non-profit organization called the Center for Wooden Boats on Lake Union. It was very close to where I worked when I lived there, and I even walked by one day to see about volunteering. Never happened due to work, but it turns out they have an old ten foot boat they would like to expand to sixteen feet, which is very close to the type of boat we are now lofting. If it works out well, we may be able to have the boat delivered to us and we can finish the boat out possibly before the end of the year. I think this might be particular to our class in general, which would be kind of awesome.

Anyhow, hope all is well. Enjoy.