Allouette was commissioned in 1998 . It was the first boat that I had used the computer to fair the lines with . Having generated the full size frame patterns on the computer , I then emailed them to a company in Toronto that plotted full size patterns on mylar . Until that point I had lofted designs on the shop floor full size . –Meticulously erasing and re-drawing 20 foot long lines on my hands and knees , massaging 3 views of a small scale designers drawing into into a full size drawing where all 3 views were in agreement to the centre of a pencil line . This is the way ships and boats have been laid out for hundreds of years . When drawn by hand at a small scale , and then scaled up to full size , the thickness of the designers pencil line can be almost half an inch in full scale . Not good enough for cutting out frames . The beauty of a computer generated drawing is that the centre of the line can be as thin as you like , up to a large number of decimal places if you have a fast enough computer . When it came to a boat this big I didn’t have the space to do a lofting . In one of the earlier photos there is a scale mock up of the frames that I printed and set up to make sure that this new black magic was really going to work . My construction technique has since evolved to doing the design in house , and going directly from a computer generated design to cutting the frames with a CNC router . The photos are a bit grainy , because they even pre-date my use of a digital camera . These were all done with film , taken to the camera shop for development and recently scanned .
