: - John, me again! I got some input from a professional
: designer/builder which I have summarized -

: The Cap'n Blackburn design has been around for a long while. With
: these dated designs from the likes of Atkins, etc. the originals
: were hand drawn for professional builders, you might get 4 or 5
: sheets, some offsets and scantlings, that's about it. It's
: assumed you have plenty of building experience. Plans were often
: prepared for a yard the designer worked with so details were
: resolved with a phone call.

While your friend may be correct in general, the Blackburn is a Bill Garden design. The late Mr Garden was renowned for the detail and quality of his drawings; that design had 11 sheets of plans. Many of Bill Garden's boats were built by amateurs. BTW, don't be fooled by the 'old-timey' look of the boat; it's not necessarily a sign of a very very old design.

: I agree with you that's no excuse for poor quality reproduction but
: if the originals were in pencil and improperly stored maybe
: that's all they had to work from. I think a note about quality
: should be added to their web site though.

There is absolutely no way that any of the originals were in pencil- those guys drew with ink on vellum (later on Mylar) so that blueprints (later whiteprints) could be taken from the originals.

WB used to produce (I don't know if they re still in print) 'books' of the designs they were marketing: "Fifty Wooden Boats' and the like- which, for each design, had copies of a couple of pages from WB mag where the design had been introduced. The so-called 'study plan' I downloaded was simply a lo-res digital scan of the two Blackburn pages from that book. Most public libraries around here have those WB books.

BTW, reputable designers were not stingy with their 'real' study plans - you could get the construction sheets and usually the lines as well in the study plans package. The thing you had to pay the full price to see was the Table of Offsets - that's what you took to the loft floor, not the lines sheets.

For me, it was a great experience to deal with Joel White (friend and contemporary of Bill Garden) and take his plans & offsets to a complete (29') boat via the loft floor. You don't need to use software to design and build a 'proper' boat. (harumph, harumph,..... ;-) )

: I’m going to download a few more that I am interested in to see
: what they look like.
Thanks!
Let us know what you find.