How to enlarge ship plans from a book ?

Setting aside the copywrite concern for a moment there are several ways to do it.

The first is to work with the plan you have and a set of proportional dividers and develop each piece as you go. If you think about it, builders of full size ships don't have full size plans. They work from the dimensions they have on a set of small scale plans.

The second way to do it is to take your plan to one of the places that advertise that they make copies, preferably one that does work for architects and engineers and ask to have a copy made at the scale you want it. You draw a line on your plan say five feet long at the plan size and tell the copier that you want that line on the copy to be exactly 15/16 long if you are working in 3/16 scale.

As for the copywrite, what does the author say in the front of the book? Usually you can make copies for your own use provided you are not make copies available to others or using them for commercial purposes.

If you have a scanner, you can scan the drawings from the book, then resize them in almost any graphics program.  Then, print them out with your printer.  If the resulting drawing will be larger than your printer paper size, you can "tile" the drawing by chopping it into several sections, print each section on a sheet, then paste them all to a sheet of foamcore or similar surface.

Many printers today are combinations of a printer and a scanner, and these combo units are not that expensive.  I find resizing scale drawings are my most frequent application of my computer to my modeling.

There's one important point. Do you know the scale of the drawing in the book, or do you know any of the actual dimensions?

And actually, Amphib, back even as recently as WW2, ship frames were even layed out full sized on the floor of erecting halls.

Bill

Copyright laws is a tough one to figure out. I see no harm in making copies of the plans yourself for your own benefit. However, having a business make copies is a no no. Some places will not make/scan copies from a book because the copyright law. Keep in mind, author OWNS the drawings - unless you contact the author for permission.

Every single book out there has a copyright in them.

Wow ! Thanks guys for your response, which I did not really expect. I really appreciate your help. I think I can scurt the copywright laws, as I am only going to use the plans for myself only, and not for commercial purposes.

For my future scratch project, I chose the American built schooner BERBICE, eight, 4 pound guns, built in 1780 in the Chesapeak Bay area. Soon after her launching, she was captured by the British to server as a tender and dispatch vessel in the Caribbean islands. Wrecked on the  Island of Dominica during a hurricane in 1794.

The amount of plans cover four pages, including a sail layout and hull configuration. With so much data, enable me to make my decision.

Happy modeling  Crackers  

Bill

Yes I am aware of the full size layout on the floors of the lofts. The point I was trying to make was that the guy doing the lofting started out with a drawing, probably at a scale like 1/8" to a foot that he transferred to the full size patterns on the floor. At least the drawings I have for the Victory ship hulls were drawn at 1/8" scale.

In the present day Electric Boat has the drawings done on computers at what ever scale fits the computer screen and then sends the drawing in electronic format to the plate shop at Quonset Point where the plate burning machines cut the plate in proper size pieces. I assume Bath Iron Works and Newport New Shipbuilding and Drydock do it the same way. I'll have to ask my daughter who is a Naval Architect.

Amphib

The reason why "The Global Schooner" book devoted four pages to the BERBICE top sail schooner, is thanks to the British, every warship either captured or built, had complete drafts of the lines drawn and preserved. The BERBICE was no exception. After her capture, her lines were taken of at the British naval base at Antiqua island on the Caribbean Sea. Her lines are on file at the National Maritime Museum, at Greenwich, London. I did some research and found an old catalog of the Smithsonian Water Craft Collection in Washington, DC. To my delight, this collection of ship plans also encludes the plan of the BERBICE, taken from Howard I. Chapelle's book, "The Search for Speed Under Sail", a scholarly presentation of the history of American fast sailing vessels. If that plan is available, I will not have the task of copying from my book, but I will inquire to the Smithsonian for a copy.

Happy modeling    Crackers  

My favourite tool for err...  calculating scales is ScaleCalc 2.5 by Frank Crenshaw 

Easy to use, you can go from known to known scales (1:96 to 1:35, etc) or from known length on drawing, to desired output length, Metric, Imperial or mixed! it will give you the %age enlargement needed.

The above takes the whaa??? out of it for those of us mathematecally challenged.

Sooo, borrowing off the innernet, with a heads up to Swanny...: Real item is 110' long
drawing is 10" long
convert feet to inches 110 * 12
110' = 1320"
10" drawing to 1320" reality = 10/1320
drop the zero (in other words how many times does 10 go into 1320) and you get 1/132

So what if the drawing were 8"?
8/1320
8 goes into 1320 165 times so now we get 1/165 as your scale.

With regards to Copyright, this depends on your local laws, but broadly, if you make a copy of a drawing in a book you own, for your own personal non-commercial use, then this is covered by 'fair-use', & you should be ok in this case.

Copyright still remains with the author/publisher for 50+ years after the death of the author, depending on the laws applicable at the time of publishing.

If you know of a company such as drydock, that has existing drawings, odds-on they can be scaled to your desired scale, & will take a bit of the 'pfaff out for you, but any copy will always depend on the quality of the original.

Good luck

Thanks for the heads up on scale determination. I'm not sure what the scale the Smithsonian plan is at the moment, but I will keep all the suggestions on this posting should I have to resort to copy direct from my book. Thanks again for your help,guys.

Happy modeling   Crackers  

amphib

Bill

Yes I am aware of the full size layout on the floors of the lofts. The point I was trying to make was that the guy doing the lofting started out with a drawing, probably at a scale like 1/8" to a foot that he transferred to the full size patterns on the floor. At least the drawings I have for the Victory ship hulls were drawn at 1/8" scale.

In the present day Electric Boat has the drawings done on computers at what ever scale fits the computer screen and then sends the drawing in electronic format to the plate shop at Quonset Point where the plate burning machines cut the plate in proper size pieces. I assume Bath Iron Works and Newport New Shipbuilding and Drydock do it the same way. I'll have to ask my daughter who is a Naval Architect.

Amphib

 

It turns out the early aircraft industry worked in many ship lofts, and used the same lofting techniques, which led to many aviation drafting traditions being carried over from nautical drafting.  All aircraft have waterline references even on planes that are not seaplanes nor amphibians.  Vertical dimensions in the drawings on the drawings are referenced to waterline.  Some terms, like ribs,, bulkheads, hatches, etc., even though they are not always the same structural elements, carry over.

Two men cutting templates in the mold loft at the Tyneside Shipyard, England in 1943.  It seems to me like a laborious process, especially today with container ships larger than the TITANIC. How do they do that now ? Certainly it must be done with a modern electronic process. Inquiring minds want to know.

Happy modeling      Crackers   

Anthony

As I tried to explain the way it is done today is using CAD -Computer Assisted Drafting to draw the design of the individual piece and then transfer it electronicaly to a CNC-Computer Numerical Controlled machine to cut out the piece. No laborious lofting or templates required for each plate.

Amphib

amphib

Anthony

As I tried to explain the way it is done today is using CAD -Computer Assisted Drafting to draw the design of the individual piece and then transfer it electronicaly to a CNC-Computer Numerical Controlled machine to cut out the piece. No laborious lofting or templates required for each plate.

Amphib

As above, the plans are drawn in a CAD program, usually full 1:1 size, & cutting files sent directly to Laser cutters or Milling Machines.

I have access to a laser cutter that can deal with 4 by 8 foot & up to 1 inch thick, &  I've seen documentaries where ship builders cut bits measured by 10's of metres, all a matter of scale...

CAD is a process.  Over the last thirty years, pretty much everybody works in actual size units (integrated circuit design, and pipiing being the primary stand outs).

Those units are whatever convention is used by the office or the product, might be inches, might be feet (silly civil engineers), millimeters, meters, even decimeters for some furniture.

You then genrate a model of whatever is being documented, this might be a unitary solid or a conglomeration of parts.

In the case of things like buildings, vehicles, and the like, often the exterior extents   Those extents then define the internal parts.  Often the one computer model is used to check the subassemblies, the better to track overall changes.

In automobile desing, it's not uncommon to define the outside shell to then create the various parts.  The various parts are then "assembled" in a different file, then checked against the original model for dimensional compliance.  (Several of the large makers then have the vendors for those parts rapid prototype them per each vendor's manufacturing process, thenthe prototypes are assembled in full scale to "prove" the design before awarding subcontracts.

Personally, I've used AutoCAD a zillion years.  I've started from a 3d model of the finished shape, and then "cut" it to make body plans, waterlines, futtoks and the like.  The same software routines that sut solids into 2d could easily be used to lofte frames one at a time.  Then bulkheads, keels, and the like.

I know it works in reverse as well, I've taken body plans, water lines, etc., drawn them into CAD to create a faired solid.  (Had to do this to fix some wood plank on bulkhead kits.)

But, as to scale--cad has no scale.  Plans, limeted, finite things of paper, have scales.

I found a documentry on Utube about some people who built a replica section of Titanic's bow. They showed a photograph of workers with full size plans in a big room.

Another way is to use a grid like so.