I have not built a boat from this program but I did build a small model
once. I printed the expanded panels on my printer onto stiff paper and
cut them out and taped them together and everything seemed to fit
together pretty much the way it should have.
Never built anything from the offsets table though.
I have noticed some weirdness up by the bow when fooling around with
this program.
Are you sure you locked in the position of your bulkheads before doing
the patterns/nesting? Numbers semed to shift around otherwise.
Let's face it, it almost works and the price is right but I never could
get beyond the model stage though. But I think it could be done.

William R. Watt wrote:
Has anyone sucessfully built a boat out of unfolded panels from this hard
chine design program?

I set up stations and made a cardboard scale model of a boat by wrapping
the cardboard around some frames, marking, unfolding, and cutting. Then I
put the offsets into the Carlson program and used the "Patterns/Nesting"
feature to arrange the panels on sheets of plywood and print out points
for hand plotting. I plotted and cut the panels from cardboard, same scale
as the model, and taped the cutouts togehter sticth-and-tape style. The
result isn't the same as the model. There is a big gap at the stem, the
topside panels are 25% wider, and the it just doesn't fit the frames.

(I've been back seeing if I can alter the offests to get a better fit and
find the auto spline makign S-curves in the keel at the stem. Very strange.)

Am wondering if others have got good unfolded panels from the program.

(The boat is the 15ft solo cruiser design I've been documenting under
"Boats" on my website.)


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