Netman, I agree that wood battens can be fine, and will work but to make one from the pot strips you'll have to rip a narrow, uniform strip from the oak then plane/sand/fair the batten. The reason people use plastic is they're uniform and smooth but wood is great, and does a fine job.
The main question about any batten is the rigidity of the batten compared to the scale you're drawing the lines. If you were drawing a 24' boat on a 8" x 11" piece of paper the curves would be pretty tight (small); so the batten would have to be very thin to make the curves and still flex then return to its original form.
The tightest curve in this skiff is the forefoot in profile ( curve between the bow stem and keel) and the sheer in plan view both will require some good flexibility in the 24" long drawing in a 1"= 1'-0" scale.
http://www.macnaughtongroup.com/yds_dra ... r_form.htm these folks call them 'splines' and they come in different lengths, but I'd call to determine what they're made of and the cross sections?
http://www.boatsofwood.com/lofting%20du ... _ducks.htm spline/batten wts of lead
http://www.ainplastics.com/ainp/Product ... areRod.htm you can contact one of the main plastics suppliers and ask for acrylic rod in square cross section and they'll sell them in lengths.... just a thought?
http://www.draftingsuppliesdew.com/mall ... upID=10071
I'd buy these if I were buying! I have a set but I didn't call them "adjustable curves" they're fine for the work you'll be doing in the scale you'll be working. I think the 18" batten will do the forefoot in profile and the 36" will probably do the sheer line in plan view.
http://www.artstuff.net/Acu-Arc-Adjusta ... p_276.html other prices the same set of battens.
'ride' is term that can bring a long discussion to lots of different boat designers, builders and owners. The term is so widely used that its hard to pin it down and talk about the same actions of the hull. For example the sport oriented boater may use the term for how their hull 'feels' in the legs at speed in a given seaway? But the commercial fisherman may be discussing how a hull handles in a seaway at different speeds and still delivers solid steering to put the boat onto the buoys or gear?
Some will describe 'ride' as the amount of smoothness of the impact of the boat in head seas at speed while others will use the term to describe the amount of pitch and roll at a different speed. Hard to describe the word so everyone is using the same references.
The complication to the 'smoothness' definition of 'ride' is the boat's displacement. There is no way a 22' welded skiff that weighs 1,000 lb. even with a 25 degree deadrise bottom (!) can ride as smoothly as a 4,500 lb 22' made of that 'plastic goop' even if the aluminum is sharper entry. The reason is mass or displacement. Part of 'ride' is a factor of overall wt or the all up displacement of the boat in question.
In a chop or short steep sides seas that may have a wind-blown top, but are not full on breaking rollers- like surf, the average small boat will usually slow down regardless of the amount of V below the chine as the shape of the waves usually wets from the topsides all the way to the sheerline.
If the waves (swells) are 20' high but they're 100' apart as in the ocean, even a flat bottom boat can travel at high speeds and not have a 'bad ride'. As the period, or distance between waves gets shorter/closer together, the wave faces get steeper until they become 45 degrees or a short
wall of water. In this condition only a larger hull would be able to travel very fast since that boat's chine would be deeper/taller than the wave height.
If a small boat travels very fast in a short chop, steep sided and close together waves then a different result happens. When the entire topsides of a boat are wetted, that is when the wave/swell/face of the seas reaches up the entire distance from the waterline/chine to the sheer; the drag on that hull, by 'wetted area', becomes a bigger factor on forward thrust than impact under the bottom.
The more the V the faster one could go in these conditions but then when the entire topsides is wetted by the shape of the oncoming seas, the boat will slow so fast you can be throw forward even if you're holding the helm. In order to compensate for this motion in a light wt boat (<28-30') in commercial net boats we usually put more spoon in the bow area.
Spoon is the description of the fullness of the forward 1/3 of the hull in plan view. A boat with lots of spoon will have the sheerline outside the chine line in Plan View. A boat with lots of spoon will throw water away from the hull but as the water travels up the sides when the bow is buried into the wave face the boat will slow drastically and pitch upward all keeping water from boarding and keeping the skiff 'dry'.
A dry skiff is one that will through water away from the hull and a wet skiff is one that allows water to run up the sides and either spill into the skiff or spray the helm. Of course in the right wind and heading the helm can be covered in spray in
any boat, (pictures of battleships with spray over the conning tower?) but lots of flam (outward lean of the topsides from the chine in metal boats- sometimes called flare incorrectly) in the forward 1/3 of the boat will help a skiff run into a short head sea and remain in good control and as dry as the wind direction allows.
Again the concept of ride is confused by displacement. The empty net skiff at speed will bounce on a very small wind shop but that same hull with a couple hundred pounds of catch will 'settle down' in that same chop and this keeps happening. That skiff loaded will rise over the short 3-4' seas almost without impact when the skiffs wt starts to be 3,000 to 4,000 lb. instead of that skiff at 900 -1,200 lb. empty.
Cheers,
Kevin Morin
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