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BLUEPRINTS and drawings for almost every type of ship that the model enthusiast desires to make are easily obtained, but the amateur, who has been fired with the ambition to make a model of such historic ships as the "Mayflower," "Santa Maria" or "Constitution," or one of the famous clippers of the age of sail, often finds himself up against a dead wall when his blueprints arrive and he attempts to start the job, because of his inability to "read" the drawings. Not that ship drawings are at all hard to understand, but, just as in reading radio diagrams, one must be familiar with the conventions and symbols employed in order to read them without difficulties.
The drawings for the hull of the model ship, known as the lines of the ship, usually consist of three plans. One is the sheer plan, illustrated at the top of the full-page drawing, Fig.1, the second, is the "half-breadth" plan, shown in the center of the same page, and the third, shown at the bottom, is the "body" plan. The sheer plan, as may be seen from the drawing, is simply a side view of the hull, and takes its name from the fact that it shows the sheer, or curve of the desk and hull lines from stem to stern. The sheer line is the line indicating the curve of the deck, and is shown, in Fig. 2, applied to a hull of the clipper type. The lines marked A, B, C and D on the sheer plan are the water lines. This may seem confusing to the beginner, who has understood that there is only one water line on a ship. This is true; there is only one real water line on a ship, and this is usually designated on the plans as "load water line," abbreviated to L.W.L., indicating the depth to which the hull sinks into the water when loaded. The other lines are simply called water lines for convenience, since they represent the same kind of section of the hull as the L.W.L. does. Suppose we took a block model of a hull, set it up in the vise, and sawed it straight through along the line A on the sheer plan.
Copyright, © 1933, by Popular Mechanics Company
