Category: Designs and designers, boat plans,books of plans

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From dinghies to the Architectura Navalis and back

It’s funny how some things in life go round and round in one’s mind.

This morning over my porage I idly read a copy of Cruising & Ocean Racing by EG Martin and John Irving that I managed to buy for a song at the weekend. I turned to a chapter by John Irving about dinghies and their design, and found that he had some remarkably trenchant things to say about pram dinghies as tenders. He strongly dislikes them – so much so that one might think he was frightened by one at a young age.

Now the people who wrote that book could afford sizeable yachts, and could perhaps live with with tenders lashed to their decks that were long enough to have sharp bows – but that isn’t true for most of us. Prams can be a fact of life, so I was interested in what he had to say about what made a good and what made a bad pram. Continue reading “From dinghies to the Architectura Navalis and back”

The wonderful Architectura Navalis

Chapman

Here’s something delicious for those of you who love to see great draftsmanship. And I do mean great – some of the work here is enough to pin back a fella’s eyelids and make him dribble.

This is Frederik Henrik AF Chapman’s Architectura Navalis. Published in 1768, it is a compendium of drawings of what Chapman, a prominent Swedish naval architect, considered to be the best and most interesting ships and boats of the time. Best of all, you can see them here:
http://www.sjohistoriska.se/

For a timeline and a list of Chapman relics, click here:
http://www.bruzelius.info/

Finally, here is one more postage-stamp sized image from the collection. I should warn you that the downloads held by the museum are in the tiff format and they’re also pretty big – you’ll need an image editor or viewer with a tiff facility to see them, and you’ll need something a little newer and with more memory than the old Windows 2000 laptop wordbox I use to view them easily.

Chapman


How to build a canvas canoe




Canvas canoe

Here’s another terrible temptation for all you winter-time boat dreamers.

I imagine you’d have to be pretty hardy to build a canvas canoe using real canvas these days, but people use Dacron painted over with a seal. I’m pretty sure there will be something on the techniques involved at Duckworks at www.duckworksmagazine.com, as the Duckmeister is himself a canvas canoe fan.

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I think also you might have to think a bit about this author’s suggestions about the kinds of wood you might use for various components – ‘thin oak’, for example, might now be replaced with ply of some kind.

Still, I there’s enough information here to build a fun and very retro little boat Continue reading “How to build a canvas canoe”