Wooden Boat People

By McKenzieDriftBoat.com

dory design software?

Hoping that someone on here has found a solution for my quandary...

I've been working on combining lines from a Mckenzie double-ender and a Briggs style grand canyon dory, and have gotten really sick of pulling lines from my boats, hand-drafting on paper and then building new cardstock models to pull lines off of. At this point, I have enough particular requirements for the design that I don't want to hire someone else to draw up plans, and so I'm hoping that there might be a computer program that can help me lay out the panels and adapt shapes.

Has anyone had experience with such a program? Other ideas of an easy way to adapt lines? I've looked at a few sea-kayak design programs, but they don't seem to fit the bill. I'm fairly computer savvy, but don't have any cad experience. It seems like there should be a fairly simple software that allows the user to adapt the rocker profile, transom, sheer line, etc, on a single-chine boat like a dory.

It shouldn't make much of a difference, but I'm building stitch-and-glue, and am using bulkheads and decking instead of removable frames. Overall length of the designs ranges from 14-18', and the designs all have a large flat-section in the rocker profile similar to rogue river boats.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks for your time.

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Permalink Reply by Rick Newman on February 14, 2012 at 9:29am

Ben,

Take a look at what Guy Fredrickson did. He used Excel to generate coordinate numbers and then an undetermined drawing program. Will it do what you want? I don't know, ask Guy. Jason Knight and others have been using Google Sketchup. I know that there are some open source and Linux drawing programs around, however I don't know the learning curve or the limitations.

Good Luck,

Rick Newman

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Permalink Reply by Randy Dersham on February 14, 2012 at 8:58pm

There is a good program called ProChine that you can try out for free. It will take a little bit to learn 3D software but it is very intuitive and allows you to bend the shape of the shear, chine, or transom independently and then develop the side panel to see how the shape lays out.

I use ProChine to get close to the basic shape that I'm after then import that file into Rhino to do the rest of my fitting of decks, seats, etc.

http://newavesys.com/products.htm is the link for ProChine

3http://www.rhino3d.com/ is the link for Rhino3D

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Permalink Reply by Jason Knight on February 16, 2012 at 3:39am

Randy,
I am not familiar with this "windows" that the program runs in... Haha j/k
Just wishing there was an Osx version of that software.

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Permalink Reply by Randy Dersham on February 16, 2012 at 6:48pm

heh, that's what VMWare is for. I run all Macs too.

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Permalink Reply by Jason Knight on February 16, 2012 at 7:06pm

I am going to have to seriously consider that! Thanks for the heads up

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Permalink Reply by Frank R on February 15, 2012 at 9:48am

There is Freeship available here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/freeship/

There is a Yahoo group to get help. Some tutorials there too. I have found some additional online help. Contact me and I can send some stuff your way.

An older program is Carlson:

http://carlsondesign.com/software/add-ons/shareware/hull-designer

This program has a lot of sample hull plans. I think there are some dory plans you can manipulate.

Freeship can import .hul files. Good for starting out for playing around and experimenting.