Hi Carl,
I have come across your thread and acknowledge your diligent work in constructing model boat kits from scratch.
As you seem to have a penchant for ferries and passenger vessels in general I thought my contributions in a German model boaters' forum might be of interest to you too.
A couple of weeks ago I discovered the DELFTship (DS) hull lofting programme and was struck by it.
First because in its base version it can be downloaded and used totally free of any license charges.
And believe me, the free version is fully sufficient for generating lines plans suited for model making purposes.
I can only nudge you towards using this software for your hull frames reconstruction work too as it will save you hundreds of tedious drafting hours.
I was so amazed how quickly I could get grips of DS and produce hull lines of all sorts of vessels in virtually no time.
Added to this comes the benefit that once you have produced a hull model you can set as many sections at any position of the hull as you please, be it frame sections, waterlines, buttocks or diagonals.
You can also linearly scale a hull to any other suitable dimensions, so that you can start with a similar base form and scale that to you intended design's main dimensions.
This will cut the time to arrive at a set of lines even further.
But you could also transform a hull by the relevant naval architect's hull form parameters according to Lackenby's method, if you feel so inclined.
Thus you can produce hull lines like a ship yard would on contracting a new order.
I have started digitizing hull forms here in my thread in said forum from mainly data sheets of vessels that can be found on a few shipping companies' websites which contain little excerpts from the general arrangement plans (GAP).
Because one can load those GAP excerpts as background images in DS and gather the hull lines from there.
For some of the hull lines that I present I possessed a copy of the vessel's body plan.
Some of the lines were produced on request of other model boaters who wanted to build a model of a particular vessel but lacked plans of her.
As I already have posted hull lines of some cruise ships and a ferry maybe this could nurture your interest as well?
However, a word of warning, concerning the loading time of the images in the first few postings of mine.
When I started publishing them in that forum I didn't care for the image sizes but just set links to the bmp files as DS output them (of course DS also handles the common CAD file format DXF in case you require to further process them in another CAD programme).
Until a model boater friend complained about the pages' loading time.
From then on I converted the images to compressed file formats beforehand to which I link now.
So the latter postings in my thread will load much faster.
Here are e.g. my hull lines of one of the most elegant and sleek ferries ever built in my opinion (until they ruined her by adding ugly buoyancy blisters to her hull to meet IMO/SOLAS regulations introduced after the ESTONIA sinking).
see
hull lines of TOR BRITANIA.
How about producing a kit of her?
Cheers
Ralph
Author
Topic: Linkspan Models Norland / Norstar - Development of a kit..... (Read 198430 times)