Wei Shi's blog

Small Craft Building: Preparation

After the break, we will start our first small craft building project: Don's dory. We are going to finish this dory in 6 weeks. This is exciting and challenging.Finally, we are going to do boatbuilding works.

The preparation includes three parts: establishing the team, organize the cutting list, general time table (project planning) and calculation of the material.

1. Establishing the team.

14 students plus Vickle are put into 3 teams. Chris will be there for all teams and I am sure Vaughn will be another important tutor to supervise and support us. Our team has Sebastien, Jade,

Kenny, Tian and me. Have not got a name for our team, but I think we can figure it out later.

2. Organize the cutting list

Cutting list tells what parts we need to build. For Don’s dory, the cutting list is below:

   

(Photo by Tian)

3. Project planning ( i will finish this part later)

4. Calculation of the material.

Calculation of material for Don's dory is a hard task. Although we have got the cutting list, we still have the problem for the amount and kind of material we need. Vaughn told me that figuring out the material stuff is really a challenging issue in boatbuilding, even for experienced boatbuilders like himself. It may take days or weeks for him! Sounds scary? Yes. For us, boatbuilding students, lack of experience and knowledge in the material and building process makes it even harder. But calculation of material is very important as it determines the cost of the boat and the benefit for boatbuilders.

We used AutoCAD for the calculation. After all, the plan of Don’s dory is there and it has all information needed for the construction of the dory. Materials includes pine, plywood, yellow cedar… 

 We also built the bench last Wednesday, see pictures below:

 

 

SolidWorks practice

a solidworks practice for this week

finally started to get into the programme

Sailboat model (Rhino)

I made this sailboat model in Rhino as a practice. I did not find more pictures of the details, so this model is little bit rough. The most difficult part of model is the hull. Rhino is a very powerful and easy-to-use program for hull modelling, I think next step is to import the hull into Maxsurf to do some analysis... Well, analysis, still have lot to learn about this.

 



    

AutoCAD Assignment

Yesterday we did an AutoCAD assignment. We were asked to draw centerboard and rudder according to an existing plan in AutoCAD. Our drawing should include several different layers for lines, dim, text and we need to make new layout in paper space to display our drawing in right scale. 

The assignment included five stages: 

1.Sketch. We need to sketch the plan on paper, copy necessary information from the original plan. I think this is the most important part. The sketch will tell you what to draw. It provides basic information for the assignment.

2. Drawing in AutoCAD. Follow instructions of the assignment, create different layers, create drawing from the sketch.

3. Print out draft. 

4. Mark out. Check your draft with Chris, and to see if there is any mistakes. Mark them out, and then go back to your computer and fix them in AutoCAD.

5. Print the final drawing.

At 4 pm, we handed in our marked out draft and the final drawing to Chris.

AutoCAD, boat plan and faying surface

This morning, we started with a discussion of our feelings of drawing a plan in AutoCAD. The small boat was designed for beginner boatbuilders, so as the plan itself.We got six sheets of plans. And guess what, everyone seems confused, because we can not decode the plan.As we were asked to draw the plan in AutoCAD, we found it is so difficult to duplicate it because we can not find enough measurements!

This proved a fact: for a boatbuilder, knowing how to use AutoCAD is far from enough. AutoCAD is powerful and useful tool, but you need to combine boatbuilding knowledge with your AutoCAD skill in order to get expected outcome (we have done several drawings in AutoCAD: tool box, oilstone box, stem section, deck camber, scupper hole...I think everyone in the team now knows how to use AutoCAD and has got basic drawing skills). That is why programmes such as AutoCAD are only computer-AIDED design programme.

Luckily, the course of boatbuilding is the exact process for our learning of boatbuilding knowledge. Chris showed us this morning the relationship between the faying surface and the PT (Plank Thickness).Actually, this is one of those difficulties we had in yesterday drawing. The length of the faying surface is PTx4.This is one of those important rules for boatbuilders.

 

moving to Typepad

Have not written new blog for couple of days. This is because that the Vox is closing down, and I am not sure which blog we are going to use for our course.Today, we made the decision to move to typepad. As a Vox user, we can get one free typepad blog. Hope they won't charge us in the future.~~~~~~