Week 1 - Refining my Technique

Hello Readers,

    My first will be not directly about shipbuilding, but rather a somewhat-related side project. Last weekend, before Halloween, I'd decided to construct a last-minute Halloween costume out of foam board, the same material I will be building the hull out of. It had been a while since I worked with foam board, so I figured I should practice working with it before setting out on such an intricate endeavor as building a ship.

    Of course, I refreshed rudimentary skills such as blade work, scoring, beveling, and curling the foam, but more importantly, I thought up some experimental techniques which would be useful for making my ship. One such technique was a method to enlarge computer-generated images to the scale of large sheets of foamboard, without the need of a large printer to print templates onto paper. This would involve printing a template onto a standard 8.5" x 11" sheet of heavyweight cardstock, and using it like a "stencil" for light.

    I then cut the printed pattern out carefully using a fresh #11 craft razor blade, making sure to follow exactly the printed lines. Because the outline would be scaled up, any small error in my cutting would also be enlarged, causing much more drastic effects on the enlarged product. I also cut a matching hole in a cardboard box, and taped the stencil onto it, using duct tape, making sure that there were no wrinkles that would let light leak through. I used duct tape because it was what I had on hand, but any heavy tape that would be opaque to light such as gaffer tape would work just as well.

    Inside the box, I placed my headlamp, about level with the aperture in this rudimentary lightbox. I chose a headlamp simply because it was about the brightest light I had sitting around. I realized here that I should have placed the opening for the stencil on the other side of the box, as that would keep the light further away from the aperture, thus reducing the diffraction and making the edges of the projection crisper and easier to trace.

    I placed the lightbox assembly on a rolling chair, so I could adjust the size of the projection by rolling it further or closer to the wall where the foam board was pinned. I adjusted the lightbox until the size of the projection fit inside the foamboard then went and traced it.

    The tracing was a little messy because I had nothing to rest my hand on as I traced, but it was fairly easy to go back through looking at a reference image and clean up some of the curves and wiggly lines. Once the pattern was traced I could simply cut it out with the razor in 2 steps to ensure a clean cut, the first a light scoring--roughly 1/3rd of the way through--carefully following the line, and the second a full-depth cut which doesn't need to be as precise, as the blade will "catch" in the score groove and will guide itself. The somewhat counterintuitive result of this is that the more you try to control the path of the blade, the worse the cut will come out. I've found that it's best to loosen your grip and let the blade go where it wants to, and it will fluidly find its way around the curves and the bends and leave you with a nice cut. 

    I plan to use this projection method to construct the hull of the model ship, because it allows me to design hull shapes more easily on a computer, then bring them to full scale onto a sheet of foam. This is beneficial because the smooth, symmetrical, streamlined shape of a boat hull is far easier to design with computer-generated shapes and images than by hand on pencil and paper.