Canoe building this week has taken place on our kitchen table with the drafting supplies. I’m using the table of offsets in Canoecraft to make the plans for the station molds. Not super thrilling work, but it is exciting seeing the shapes of the canoe coming out on the paper. Plotting the points requires a square edge like our table has, but I’ll need to take the papers to the shop where I can drive small nails into the points and join them with a batten. I shouldn’t drive nails into the kitchen table.
The extra sheet of paper with numbers is the table of offsets converted to metric. I find it much easier to use millimetres than the awkward feet/inches/eights+ notation given in the book. Even if it was just in inches like 19-7/16 it’d be fine. But 19-7/16″ would be written in the table of offsets as 1-07-4+. Not very intuitive, or easy to find on a ruler. So I wrote a quick PERL program on the computer that I could throw the funny notation into and it would generate me a table in metric units.
