Tally Ho--Stability

[Christian Williams]

Some implications here for the Bruce King choices in our designs. I call the Ericsons "tender," which is taken as criticism but not intended to be. The trade-offs are explained.

We all have favorite YouTube series, and I won't bore you (too much) with mine. But what Leo has accomplished is notable, and novelistic in scope and character. He is himself some transplanted primordial version of ineffable Englishness, nowhere more apparent than in the conversation with his naval architect. One imagines them on Dunkirk beach, having tea whilst being strafed and then coming back a year later in a new expeditionary force with dry socks to have a go at it again. Leo's primary helper has no feet, his feet having been run over by a railroad train in an earlier life. This rarely comes up as he bounds about the project on prostheses. Other workers project bonhomie and subtle Leo-mockery while doing jobs that by any definition are repetitive, awkward and endless. The Tally Ho project illustrates almost every boatbuilding skill now absolutely lost to time because supplanted by modern manufacture and materials. As resultthe inside of the boat looks like the inside of a Steinway. Behind the scenes, or between the lines as it were, lie personal lives roughly sketched, vast sums of money laid out (can Patreon really pay for all this?), woodworking tools and machines for purposes I didn't know exist, wood that must run $100 a linear foot, and a tone of indefatiguable carry-on-ness that is, ah, out of fashion.

YouTube didn't used to exist, don't you know. I think it is the premiere database of our time. I have learned more from it than any book or person, and it is insufficiently understood as a world-widening force.

 

[Bolo]

Leo runs a fascinating YouTube site doing things that are so far from what our Ericsons are like because he's building a wooden boat but it's all fun to watch and learn something in the process too. Which bring me to YouTube being the "premiere database of our time", as you put it so well, Christian. I once heard someone say that if you watched enough YouTube videos you could probably get what is equivalent to a college degree education. That's a stretch but it does illustrate the point about YouTube being a great learning tool not only for sailing but almost everything else in the world. It's my first go to when I can't figure out how fix something, cook something , plant something, etc....you get the point.

 

[SMilan]

I'm rehabbing a 1978 O'Day 23 from stem to stern - and constantly running into unexpected problems. Thank goodness for YouTube. You can learn anything.

 

[Mr. Scarlett]

Great visual explanation, thank you.

 

[bgary]

what Leo has accomplished is notable, and novelistic in scope and character.

Truly

I got sucked into the Tally Ho series a while ago, and still find it fascinating. Leo is an artist with wood, and when I see that endless curl rising from the blade of a chisel or plane, I can only wonder how much time goes into just sharpening tools. And keeping things tidy.

I found the process of lofting especially interesting, and was simply in awe of the skill and care that went into (e.g.) the dovetail joints for the deck beams. And some things were eye-opening - it had never occurred to me that the inner and outer faces of each frame would have to be shaped to meet the angle of the planking at that frame. Obvious, now, having seen how it was done, but a revelation at the time.

There were a couple of small things I might have quibbled with in the video about stability calcs, but overall a very good explanation, and a great addition to the series.

 

[Christian Williams]

I was going to build a Penguin (a 1950s plywood dinghy). The lofting scared me off. Lofting--arghh!

 

[bgary]

The lofting scared me off. Lofting--arghh!

<lol>

I've always been fascinated at how a designer can draw a 3D shape in 2D, and then a builder can take those 2D drawings and produce a 3D shape.

"back in the day", I was part of a build-crew for a custom cold-molded 2-tonner (I was "cheap labor"). it was interesting to see the process unfold from drawings through lofting to frames on a strong-back.

In this case (mid-70s) the drawings came with a "table of offsets" - basically the designer had taken measurements off the drawings and recorded those in a table. Those measurements represented the distance from some reference point to the skin of the hull at each horizontal (waterline), vertical (buttock line) and diagonal on the drawings.



The builder would plot those lines at full scale on a lofting floor, subtract the thickness of the hull at each point, "fair" the lines with long bendy battens, and use the resulting line to create a template for a frame or bulkhead. Those frames were then attached to a "strong-back", leveled and trued, and that's what defined the shape of the hull.

REALLY a labor-intensive process. And any error - no matter how small - in interpreting the offsets or plotting the points or fairing the curves becomes a distortion in the shape of the resulting hull.



Nowadays, a designer can fair the lines in the computer and save the shape as a 3D file. The builder can open that file and plot 2D frame templates on mylar at full scale, eliminating any error-producing manual scaling or fairing.

Some high-end builders go so far as to use big 5-axis CNC machines to cut frames to the exact shape directly from the 3D computer file. And I suspect before too much longer builders will be able to simply 3D-print the frames at full size.