Construction Zone Ahead

 



Almost all of the furniture is out of the saloon. All of the fuel and water tankage has been removed. We will be replacing the rotten water tanks. After we clean 43 years of schmoo out of the bilge. Then we fair and paint the hull and bilge. We will replace the old stainless steel water tanks with flexible tanks. Why flexible tanks? So that we don't have to tear apart the boat again if a tank fails.

Like a NYC street when it rains, the schmutz in the bilge makes a muddy paste when cleaner touches it. The experience is just as disgusting as it sounds.


"Why does the picture of your saloon look weird?" It's a 3D model built up from many photographs (photogrammetry). If you care to install Blender (it's free, open source software), I'll send you the model so you can "walk" through the boat for yourself. Also, if you own a Formosa 46, the model may be useful for your own design work. Ultimately, the entire boat will be modeled in Blender and Inventor.

View looking aft.

View looking starboard.

Saloon model in Inventor, with refrigerators and storage bins.


The Blender model allows us to visually design the boat interior, while Inventor provides technical drawings. We can design the frames and materials in Inventor, which then spits out a Bill of Materials, lengths and miters we need to cut, and it will even perform stress analysis. 

Briefly, the whole process looks like this:

  1. Take lots of measurements
  2. Feed measurements into Inventor, building up the complex shapes using primitives (basic shapes)
  3. Take lots of pictures
  4. Feed the pictures to WebODM (also FOSS, but I paid because it is that good)
  5. Open the 3D model in Blender and fix things
Some of these projects have been in the planning stages since 2015. And planning on how to best plan these projects. It has been a solid two years getting my head around Inventor, Blender, and photogrammetry. To see it all on screen and in progress in the boatyard feels like a a bit of an achievement. /understatement

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