ade some good progress in the process of modeling my new kayak… For a human – powered watercraft, water doesn’t like complex curves and shapes I think, so they need to be as simple as possible (it is not too simple to come to that simplicity though). The model is then decomposed by Free!Ship into several “developable” plates, at this point, professional builders could just output the plates to a large CNC machine, which would precisely cut the plywood accordingly.

I print those plates to paper to make a 1:15 paper model. Cut the plates with a pair of scissors, then stitch them together using transparent duct tape. Making a paper scaled model would help verifying about the “develop – ability” of the product, double check if there is any design mistake, and give a clear view on how we should compose the pieces into the final boat. For simplicity, I didn’t draw details such as the cockpit, skeg, lines or hatches, just the basic shape of the kayak.

The paper model is a bit ugly (my hands are not too skillful though), but the pieces come together perfectly, the shape just looks like a bamboo leaf! This gonna be a long, thin kayak with very little freeboard! Next would be finding some free time to materialize all these drawing onto the plywood sheets. I don’t have a printer that’s large enough to print the plates in their real sizes, so I would just redraw them using offset table exported from the CAD software, actually, I prefer this manual method!