: Dave, I'm also interested. Did you contact Martijn about your problems?

: Cheers,
: Bryan

I haven't. I did wonder whether the Delftship developers would be interested, but didn't want to burden them with a 'problem' which is probably as expected. Maybe I should.

The problem was that the sides and bottom didn't meet up.

The boat has a standard 4 panel hull. I also added a totally flat deck in Delftship, to get it to give me the deck dimensions. A flat deck as a starting point works nicely when building a deck Point Bennett style which I wanted to do - start with a flat deck then form a peak in front of the cockpit. However I got the following seemingly contradictory results in panel shapes developed.

- All panel shapes - side panels, bottom panels and deck panel - claimed to need the same number of iterations to develop them: 5.
- The deck panel however clearly should have been perfectly developable cos it was entirely flat side to side !
- Delftship claimed to be able to show where the panels were undevelopable with green and red highlighting, but switching that on seemingly showed nothing: nothing got highlighted. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place?

So given no highlighting and the same number of iterations to produce the seemingly fully developable deck and the sides and bottom I just cut out the panels and started. It became obvious that the sides and bottom pieces would not fit together: wiring the bottom pieces together and wiring the sides at stem and stern then oiffering them up showed a good match along the middle 70% of the hull where there was little twist in either, but at the ends there were gaping 'mouths' where they didn't meet. I had several stations in place so knew the basic shape was right. Setting up a line between top of stem and top of stern and measuring down to the stations showed that the side panels were basically correct: with the stations attached to the side panels in the right locations fore and aft they were at the right location vertically. So to make the bottom panels meet I had to significantly trim the panels along the keel line and add long thin V shaped extra pieces of wood along the chine. Maybe 24" long and 2 or 3" wide at the ends? Which was a bit of a pain, but not ridiculously hard.

There was twist in the bottom panels, and I concluded that Delftship could not cope with twist. Which is fine since twist in a panel does indeed mean it is not truly developable, but which is also a shame cos twist is desireable on the bottom panels in pretty much all S&G designs I'd have thought.

It would be interesting to get the Delftship developers view to confirm this though, so when I find a moment I'll package up the plans and some photos showing what I ended up with and send them off. I haven't looked - is it obvious how to contact them?

Dave.