Surface the Boat!

Matt's AutoCad work continues to rapidly flourish. Below are illustrations of his progress in adding "surface" to the wire frame of the Wahoo. Now completed with this process, he's also begun polishing the hull imagery by smoothing its "skin" (shown in the reddish images) -- all handled through the wonder of that intricate, elaborate professional rendering software he's so obviously mastered. (As we've noted among ourselves, he ought to: he does this for a living!) The whole thing just amazes me, lemme tell ya.

Jeff Porteous

A Salvo of Stern Shots

Matt's been busy. Very busy. Here are pictures of his work completing Wahoo's stern areas in AutoCad. He's been firing them off to us like crazy. . . .


Jeff Porteous

Getting Wired

Matt suggests it's time for an update, and he's quite right. Clearly, this is an opportunity for recent pictures to speak for themselves, and they speak volumes.

See, Matt has been making amazing progress picking up ("lofting") measurements and particulars from the clean, accurate and highly detailed official Navy fleetboat plans he and Jeff LaRue glommed onto recently, and entering them into his Autocad computer-assisted design program. As you can see below (in illustrations provided by Matt last week), these measurements have now evolved into an accurate "wire frame" reproduction of Wahoo's eventual hull -- just as had been done with the stern diving planes shown earlier.

It's all a work still in progress, of course, as quickly evidenced by the two-dimensional sail sitting atop the hull. (Its time will come.) But Matt has now further checked in tonight with multiple images of the process of attaching a "surface" to the hull's wire frame rendering -- also still a work in progress. But isn't it magical how a famous WWII fleet submarine is coming to life before your very eyes? And hyper-accurately? How envious the Gato class boat's original designers would've been of all this technological assistance available to us today....

Yes, now we're all getting wired over this project!



Many thanks, Matt!

Jeff Porteous

Stern Plane Perspectives

Here are some additional perspectives from Matt's final stern plane drawings. The mottling of the red is due to file size reduction for the web and does not reflect the finished drawings.

First Parts: Stern Planes

To create masters, the process we've settled on is to draw up a part then send the drawing to the team member who wants to tackle it. Matt is doing the drawing in AutoCad then importing the geometry we want to model in 3D into Rhino. All of the correct cross-sections are then extracted out of Rhino and sent back to AutoCad for final documentation. We've begun to realize we are going to have a tremendous amount of data on our hands, not only of Wahoo but fleet boats in general, once the project is completed.

The first part selected were the stern planes. As I planned to take on the creation of the master I started to search for photos and plans. Matt and I agreed that the Floating Drydock drawings looked a little suspect.

What is interesting is you think you have an understanding of something then when it comes down to wanting to know definitively what it looks like you didn't really know as much as you thought you did. My experience with fleet boat stern planes is they have a certain shape and are flat in profile with tapered edges, like bow planes. This was reinforced by the planes in the Revell Lionfish kit and the Scale Shipyard Gato parts.

Since most all existing museum boats are either in the water or ground we couldn't just jack one up and take a look. We combed through the image galleries and got some good shots from Wayne Frey who spent some time last summer photographing USS Drum in Mobile. She is jacked up -- permanently resting on concrete blocks. Below is a shot of the starboard stern plane of USS Bonefish taken prior to her launch.

We discovered the stern plane geometry was much more complicated than we originally thought. The stern planes had a definite airfoil shape, tapered to a knife edge on the trailing end and slightly rounded on the leading edge. The outboard sides were flat but significantly thinner than the root. The pronounced taper from root to outer edge along with the fore and aft foil shape makes for a complicated piece. As a result the drawing will be sent to Tom Anderson in California and he will CNC the port and starboard masters for us. This will ensure all the curves are true and both port and starboard planes will match perfectly. Matt did an excellent job drawing the part. Here is a perspective from his work.

For those familiar with the stern planes of the Revell Gato in 1/72, you will notice that it does have a foil shape to it. However, the part is a constant thickness across the span giving it a chunky outboard edge.

Once the masters are CNC'd then we will detail them with the appropriate weld lines.

PHC