re: The Lofting Process

Good for you for lofting from scratch. I would imagine paper patterns were available or digital printouts I guess these days.
Lofting is a fascinating process that has layers of complexity. I doubt you will be required to do some of them for a kayak but the process will still help you greatly in understanding the build.
Let me run on for a minute…. 😁
The purpose of lofting, for more complex shapes at least is to find discrepancies in the offsets and to “proof” them full size before proceeding to cut pieces.
With computer design some of the need for lofting may be lost but originally it was needed because the margin of error was significant when a designer took the offsets from a scale drawing and then the builder laid them out many times larger.
For that reason “building stations” were not in the table of offsets. To get building stations the builder first had to fully loft the lines in three views, make changes in each line to make them perfectly fair, reconcile each change in the other two views, and continue until all three views were perfect and no offset was different in one view from any other.
With this all done, he could mark in the building stations and take his own offsets from his full size, fair drawing for drawing them in section and finally cutting them.

That’s the simple version, there’s a lot more in lofting.  « Presentation ends »

Sorry about that Eric, I’ve been lofting boats since I was 21 and rarely get to talk about it to anyone who has even heard of  it. 🙄😁🤣