Swimming Scow Re-design Part 1

I’ve certainly expounded on the value of model making before but I’ll stress it again.
In round bottom craft, a half model is usually the go to and I would say it will suffice in delivering a sense of shape and perhaps even dimensional information from which one can start lofting or even build moulds.

In simple craft it’s not so difficult to go all in with the smaller details of planked model construction. Let’s look at some of the benefits of that.
Firstly it gives you a very representational model that can simply bring enhanced pleasure when studying its details. More importantly it gives you an opportunity to walk through the building process and consider how you might tackle orders of operation; assembly and clamping challenges. Even required tools.

When commencing on this build I decided to produce scale versions of my building materials, including standard thicknesses, widths, lengths and anticipated quantities of materials. I often find I have underestimated something here or there and this is a fantastic, no stress way to discover that. You can even track your cut- offs to see if there are opportunities to reduce, reuse or eliminate waste.
Scale is important here. The 1
:12 scale I tried was too small for convenience. It just made it harder to build and so was more of a time waster than and frustration creator. It did however get the ball rolling on this re-design project.
The 1
:8 scale is about as small as you want to go for a constructed model like this and 1:4 might be even better. Of course there’s a point at which you might as well just build the real thing and bigger models can get cumbersome to keep around. Starting with a simple un-detailed drawing was helpful too. It allowed me to explore the construction alternatives and then make note of them as I went. I only wish I had written down the material quantities I started with but I can easily extrapolate those from the model at this point.

 

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