Dan Newland On
Boat Design, Basics & Structures
NW Maritime Center, March 28th
6:30 PM

By Dan Newland
Here are some pictures of a project I did to support the 2 classes in boat design I’m giving in the next few weeks. One talk is at the NW School of Wooden Boat building next Tue. the other is for the Port Townsend Sailing Association at the NW Maritime Center March 28, 6:30 PM.

I built 3 boat models, all of the same scale and with similar WL length to illustrate the effects of overhang and waterplane area on boat motion and real vs. calculated hull speed.

The 3 boats are illustrating a modern ultra-light weight planing boat, 27′ 9″ overall length, (my own design), an old “Q” class boat designed in 1913 by John Alden with huge overhangs to optimize for a racing rule, and then a double-ended cruiser designed in the 1940’s, also by Alden.

Anyway, they came out very nicely and the wood was just stunning, really absolutely amazing.

I contacted Alden Designs now run by Niels Helleberg N.A. to see if they had any more information on the two Alden models I did, the double ended cruiser design #798 and the “Q” class boat “Shirley”.  He gave me the displacement of 798 (9520 lbs) but didn’t have anything for Shirley.  However, he did come up with these photos of Shirley taken around 100 years ago.  Gorgeous, aren’t they?

Interestingly, they didn’t have any line drawings for Shirley, only construction specifications so he asked if he could use my line drawings and pictures of the model I did.  They aren’t super accurate since they were scanned from a book, then enlarged and finally digitized so a number of errors were present but still, all in all, they came out pretty well.

Hope to see you there. This stuff is true for traditional and modern designs.