Six Metre yachts have recently celebrated their first century. I hope that all of the ± 325 classic Sixes in existence today will still be around a century from now and racing hard.
During the first century, however, 75% of all classics disappeared – through sinking, fire, neglect and even the chainsaw.
Documenting one’s own Six
To avoid a similar loss during the 21st c., each owner must take steps to permit a replica to be re-built in case his boat disappears.
As a minimum, these steps involve acquiring a table of offsets, producing the lines plans and the equivalent of a construction plan. It is also desirable to have a Six Metre rating certificate.
The lines plan (a profile plan showing the lines of the vertical buttocks, a body plan showing the vertical cross-sections and a plan view showing the horizontal waterlines) either exists in its original form as drawn by the architect or has to be created anew by “taking off the lines” of the hull. To do this, one can proceed manually or use a laser-based device.
If the lines are taken off manually, one can easily – at the same time – measure the hull for its rating (see the article and the Excel tables at http://www.classic6mr.info for instructions and a calculator).
The first output of “taking off the lines” is a table of offsets which gives the offsets for each buttock and waterline at each station. A naval architecture program like DELFTship (available free in reduced form) can then process the waterline offsets and produce the second output, the lines plan.
The profile plan of the hull can then be re-worked into a construction plan, showing the location of the principal structural components: backbone, floors, frames, and deck beams. One can stop one step short of this by completely photographing the inside and outside of the hull and then measuring the position of each structural component.
International archive for Six Metre plans
I wonder it should be tried. It would be a way for the class to ensure its continuity.
Documenting a reconstruction
It’s inevitable that every classic Six will need to be re-built during this century –and some will be lost to fire, etc. When this happens, her then owner will thank his predecessor for having documented her.
The re-build should also be carefully documented for posterity: preparation of the construction specifications, photos and a narrative of the project.
For information on the construction specifications, see Opinion n° 1 of the ISMA Classics Committee available at the link above.
Two recent Six metre reconstruction projects, the re-build of Jill in 2007-2008 and the replica construction of Cherokee in 2008-2008, have taken construction documentation to new heights, Jill with hundreds of photos and Cherokee with her highly pictorial blog.
For Joanna, I started with a Web site, but Tom Daniels’ Cherokee blog convinced me that the blog approach is both easier to create and more accessible to others as a means of documentation.
Thus this blog…..