December 9, 2018

This month's meeting was hosted by Alan at his home in Welland.

The theme of the meeting was Tracing Ship's Lines in CAD.  He presented a demonstration using the free software DraftSight.  Rather than tracing ships plans he traced a Naval Anchor from a JPEG of scaled plans and then explained how to print to scale.  The first rule is to always draw full size and use a scale of print paper to your  build scale.  As there was considerable detail a downloadable PDF of his presentation is available here...

tracing_images_with_cad.pdf
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Alan also demonstrated using a limited free PDF to AutoCAD Drawing conversion software to create a drawing file.  He showed how it didn't create a clean drawing from photos of old plans but explained how it worked well with PDFs of clean CAD Plans.  If you should happen to aquire CAD drawings as a PDF, you could easily convert them into a DWG file you could work on to add to or modify.  A downloadable PDF of this presentation is available here...

convert_pdf_to_dwg.pdf
File Size:	1190 kb
File Type:	pdf

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Alan also presented the 3D cannon and cannon balls that are to mount on his scratch built carriage.  The items were printed FREE at the local library in PLA plastic.  The two piece horizontally split  halves of the cannon were not yet cleaned up or solvent welded together.  They have a slight warp to them and the printed layers are quite distinguishable,  looking like wood grain when viewing too closely.  He will be meeting with the library to discuss printing again, but vertically this time, to hopefully eliminate warpage and reduce the visability of the layers.

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David brought in his copy of the NMM build plans for HMS Canada, a 74 gun 3rd Rate ship of the line (1761).  He had created plans of 14 station bulwark outlines onto paper for a client to build from.  A photo of these can be seen below...

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Ray brought in DVD copies of photos he acquired of the Cutty Sark, HMS Victory and HMS Warrior that he gave out to all the attendees.  Thank you Ray!

The meeting ended with a tour of Alan's workshop and an oppourtunity for people to see his extremely slow progress of his 1:64 scale build of HMS Bellerophon.             Two steps forward and one step back, eh?