Inside Angle: One Step at a Time
There are yacht designers and there are “yacht designers.” Some “yacht designers” are really interior decorators who whimsically wave wrists and arms while theatrically obsessing over whether the throw pillows match the Fenda-Sox. Some are exterior stylists influenced by supercars or sneakers depending on the day. All have computer rendering software. But real yacht designers are engineers with years of hands-on experience actually building vessels and learning lessons along the way, the easy ones and the hard ones.
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I’m a yacht designer with an engineering degree who spent many early years building what I had concocted on paper and screen. Those lessons are poured into every modern design my company produces for vessels around the world. But my most stinging lesson in the realities of designing for construction happened when I was twelve, thankfully before I ever started building boats.
It was the late 1980s and the Prince family had graduated into a new, larger powerboat, which necessitated dock stairs. Because our dock was floating, a fixed set of three or four wooden treads would do the trick. My dad tasked me with the mission of designing, budgeting and building the stairs out of two-by-fours and marine ply.
I eagerly began drawing to scale on graph paper. I would base my plans on readily available lumber. “Three-quarter plywood is ¾” thick,” I thought to myself, “and two-by-fours are two-inches-by-four-inches.”
This is the part in the action-adventure movie where the director leaves the pilot and co-pilot calmly in the cockpit and pans to the smoldering wire in the cargo area. A disaster is brewing.
I penciled my plans so that each pre-cut piece would fit together like a 3D puzzle with ¾-inch plywood and 2x4s, drawing an elevation, plan view and side view like a real draftsman. Almost unbelievably, I paused after a while and summoned the temerity to ask my 12 year-old self if every twobuhfor was really two inches by four inches. Because if not, my plans would be all wrong and my pre-cut lumber would be trash. What the kid version of me did not know is that 2×4 dimensions had been changing for longer than my grandparents had been alive.
“I’ll measure one myself and make sure,” I beamed inwardly. I found a tape measure and headed to the garage at the house I grew up in, where I knew I’d find exposed wall studs.
The tape revealed the truth; each 2×4 was actually 1 ⅝-inch x 3 ⅝-inch. Disaster averted!
This is the part in the action adventure movie where the co-pilot assures the pilot all is well and both grin smugly as the smoldering wire ignites in the cargo area. My collision with reality was proceeding headlong.
It turns out that this was a garage stud which was shorn in the 1960s, not one I would buy from the local lumberyard in the late ’80s to build dock stairs. Modern 2x4s, unbeknownst to me, were smaller yet. The U.S. Department of Commerce, after a half century of meddling, unified lumber sizes across the country. And the once full-sized 2×4 was reduced to 1 ½-inch by 3 ½-inch in 1969.
Our house was built in ’68.
With false confidence I reworked my dimensioned plans, bought the budgeted lumber with my dad and proceeded to cut each 2×4 to length before screwing everything together in the garage.
Of course, it didn’t take long to realize my stairs were going to be too short, too narrow and too shallow because each hunk of wood was off by ⅛-inch in two directions, compounding everywhere. This is the part in the movie where the pilot calls Mayday.
Son of a b—. I walked out of the garage to face the world again. Wiser.
So the next time you run into a yacht designer who wants to talk about throw pillows, British cars or tennis shoes, ask them if they ever built anything when they were twelve.
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This article originally appeared in the May 2024 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/column/inside-angle-one-step-at-a-time
