: I'm a newbie, thinking of making a SOF from Yost's website (thanks tom, great
: site), but am finding the measuments counterintuitive. Any suggestions for
: conversion to standard imperial (fractions)? Or should i just go with
: cm's?

I retyped all the numbers into an excel spreadsheet. Then I applied a formula to all the cells, multiplying them by 12 The cells were formatted to have 3 decimal places. That gave me the measurementsin inches and thousandths of an inch.

I took that data and created the frame outlines in a drawing program (adobe illustrator) by drawing a crude outline of half of a frame, then moving each corner point to the exact location. Illustrator wanted the measurements in inches and decimals, so this was ideal.

If I wanted to see the measurements in inches and 1/8ths I suppose I could write a formula for excel to generate this information, and then apply it to each cell.

Otherwise, I just have a chart on the back of one of my rulers which gives the decimal equivalents for common fractions. I'd use that. You can make the same thing in a few minutes with a calculator. or jut a pencil and paper. 1/8 is 0.125, 1/16 is half of that 0.063, 1/4 is twice 1/8, or .250, etc. Tolerances of 1/8th inch are widely recognized as "being close enough" If you measure to 1/16th you'll be doing much better than necessary. The boat flexes much more than that anyhow.

Originally I was going to use just these hlaf patterns, and then flip them over to draw the other half of the frame, but instead I then copied a mirror image of these half frames and matched up the two parts to get the whole frame.

Actually, this does not give you the cutting lines for the frames, though. These point determine the outer points for where the fabric wraps arpound the tubing. You need to measure in from these points by 3/8 inch tocet the centerpoint for the 3/4 inch holes for the tubes. After the holes are drilled you use them to determine where to cut for cutting hte frames. next time I'll do all of this in my drawing program, fasten the printouts to the hdpe, and cut the outlines of the forms before drilling. That makes the forms a bit smaller. For the Sea Tour 17-R you can get 2 sets of forms cut from a 4x4 sheet of the HDPE.

Good luck with your project

PGJ