. . . someone posts here and says, "I have this problem, blah, blah, blah." Then someone else responds, "That's not your problem, this is your problem," and proceeds to offer an elaborate explanation of how to solve a different problem.

Never-the-less, I'm going to stick my neck out and suggest that tracing stations may not be the best way to get a good 70% version of the original canoe. I do think it would be a viable way to build an accurate replica (at any scale) of the original. There is a subtle, or maybe not-so-subtle, difference here, in that a replica is dimensionally identical, or at least proportional, to the original. Ted Moores has some thoughts on this, having faithfully reproduced all the fairing flaws of his original in his copy of that canoe.

A bug in this process is that now that the stations are traced, it's necessary to go to the computer and some sort of CAD program, with which you are not familiar, in order to scale and fair the lines. I suspect that a fundamental problem at this point is that there is no numerical representation of any point along the station lines.

So, how would I have done this? I would have leveled the big boat up on sawhorses, established baselines in three planes, broken out my laser level and started building a traditional table of offsets, with half-breadths along the waterlines and depths along the buttocks lines. The two-foot station spacing would probably work, although I'd be tempted to try a 3 foot or even a 4 foot spacing. The advantage this would give me is that I would have numbers that I could plug into a CAD program (which I wouldn't do) or numbers I could plot and loft and fair by hand at full scale, 70%, or an even smaller scale (which I would do).

Reg-- I know this doesn't offer any real solutions to your immediate problems, but I wanted to throw it out there and let everyone think about it a bit. Also, it's a foggy, rainy day here, waiting for the remnants of hurricane Hannah to move through, so there's not a lot better to do that sit at the computer and type for a while!

Respectfully,
Mike Scarborough