The nicest thing about working with battens to me is that I am working directly on the wood itself, and not something else that I will then attempt to afix to the wood. I shudder at the threads I'm reading about making photocopies of drawings, taping them all together, and trying to cut out a boat from what results.

The fairing of the lines upon cutting them out is mostly a function of the person. Assuming the curves themselves are actually drawn fair of course. I openly confess to not being an award winning sawyer. So I have to go outside the line and leave myself room to sand and plane up to it, getting amaturishly faired results. A fine woodworker I am not.

However a s&g design really allows for this sloppy work nicely, if a person remembers not to simply tighten all the wires. If you've overcut an area, don't tighten those wires so much, and allow the panels to be pulled apart a little bit. That's what's so sweet about s&g imo, you can tighten and untighten the wires individually until you get the boats lines looking as perfect as you desire. You can also cut down further areas that simply are too high. You may have to take the boat apart to do this, but generally you just undo a few wires to get a saw blade between the sheets. I took them back apart myself, in light of my woodworking skills and my concerns with symetry.

> Unfortunately the cure is not so easy! Even if one makes both
> panel identical by stacking, if the joining line is not fair, as experienced
> recently by many on this bulletin board, then there will be a bulge
> or a hollow adjacent to the unfair portion of the line. There is no
> better way to get a fair line than a straight grained batten with
> as few ducks as possible. Three ducks will get a nice parabolic curve.
> A circlular curve can be reasonably forced with 4 or more ducks.

> I have used a CAD program (Autocad) to produce lines for my skin
> on frame boats using circular curves. There are no visual clues the
> the curves aren't parabolic or produced by battens. Circular segments
> are extremely easy to work with but unfortunately lines for S&G
> panels are rarely circular. Most CAD programs' curve fitting routines
> leave something to be desired. I have been a draftsman all my working
> life and have used CAD for the past 13 years and I have lots of trouble
> with hull programs.

> Bram