Traditionally the first process of building a yacht was to transfer the shape of the yacht from the lines drawing to full size on the loft floor. This was a tedious, highly skilled business, requiring meticulous accuracy, and a certain degree of interpretive skills, since at 1:30 scale even a pencil line expands to half an inch in width at full size. As has been explained, our Intergraph CAD system eliminates the lofting process, and provides the hull and deck lines at full scale, with allowances made for plating thickness, and with every frame or girder shown in detail.

For Royal Huisman Shipyard and Kees Cornelissen in Holland we produce the design information on a floppy disc in a co-ordinate format for their material to be cut by Numeriek Centrum using numerically controlled cutting equipment. For Sensation Yachts in New Zealand and Belliure in Spain we produce the lines plan at full size on rolls of clear Mylar film. Sections are drawn at each frame so that the builder can copy the exact shapes directly on to the aluminium plate, or wooden sheet. We can also produce these drawings in a similar format but at 1:10 scale. The builders can then use a plasma cutter with magic eye tracer, which has a built in ten times magnification factor. Camper and Nicholsons have a small in-house Intergraph CAD system of their own, so we send them our design files on floppy disc and they generate their own templates on site. Each builder has his own requirements, and appreciates the flexibility of our output.

A yacht's hull is formed from complex curves which only an experienced aluminium worker can reproduce to the designer's satisfaction. For the plating to retain its strength, welding must be done with minimum heat input, otherwise the material softens and loses some of its strength. Uneven heating