Plan Study: Various Designs

My interest in boats developed after we moved from the UK to Greece in 2007. We were in the protracted process of buying a house, so I had time to spare. We lived close to the sea and in the summer, unlike in the UK, the weather is hot and the water isn’t cold…so I decided to build a boat.

- Andrew Walters

Being new to boats, I started online searches and came across the Svenson’s website (www.svensons.com/boat), which features several designs from the 1950s. I chose a William Jackson design called Ace, in part because of its small size and partly because there was a web community (www.sandeace.com) devoted to the Sande Ace, which was a production version that was built by the Sande Brothers of western Washington between 1956 and 1962.

(I should add that I very much like the style of typical 1950s runabouts, and from the compliments I’ve received, it seems a lot of others do, too.)

Over the next few years, through my primary profession as an architect, I’d become familiar with a 3D CAD software package called “SketchUp” and soon realized that, rather than building boats the way that they did in the 1950s—making frames, assembling and fairing them, laying on the hull panels and cutting them to shape, then fitting the seats—the software would enable me to create a CAD model of a boat, with frames that could be placed anywhere and hull panels that could be flattened.