Thursday, October 14, 2010

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 
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:



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