{"id":35278,"date":"2022-09-23T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-23T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.autodesk.com\/products\/fusion-360\/blog\/?p=35278"},"modified":"2024-03-18T18:27:04","modified_gmt":"2024-03-19T01:27:04","slug":"dan-lee-boatbuilding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.autodesk.com\/products\/fusion-360\/blog\/dan-lee-boatbuilding\/","title":{"rendered":"Dan Lee Boatbuilding Navigates Vintage Boat Design Business with Fusion 360\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Explore how Dan Lee Boatbuilding takes early 20th-century boat designs and creates a 21st-century digitized building experience.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

You could say that Dan Lee\u2019s vintage boat design business came from a perfect storm of passions combining. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

First off, he has a life-long love of boats and boating. With his expertise in woodworking and interest in technology, he designed and built his own vintage boat for the first time a few years ago. At the end of the process, he thought it was something he\u2019d really like to do for a living, and he noticed a growing demand for vintage boats. But then COVID-19 struck. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For years, Lee collected antique \u201cbuild your own boat\u201d design plans from the 1920s and 1930s that were often packaged with magazines. During the pandemic, he had the idea to take those early 20th-century designs and create a 21st-century digitized building experience.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhile I was building my first boat, I also had a business making shelving and furniture, so I was establishing the workshop at the same time,\u201d Lee says. \u201cDuring the first lockdown, I was worried about my main business. I started looking for extra things to do for a second income. That’s when I started drawing up these vintage boat plans.\u201d And his company, Dan Lee Boatbuilding<\/a>, was born. <\/p>\n\n\n

Making What\u2019s Old New Again <\/h2>\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In Lee\u2019s office, you\u2019ll see the many antique boat plan books and booklets on the shelf behind his desk. The main challenge with those boat plans is a \u201ctable of offsets,\u201d which contain numbers for the width and height of various points throughout the boat. According to Lee, it\u2019s a daunting process. He began to take these plans and design them in Autodesk Fusion 360<\/a> for anyone to build. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI had this idea that you could draw it all in CAD and create full-size patterns for each part,\u201d Lee says. \u201cThen anyone could just go to a CNC shop, get the pieces cut, and go straight into putting pieces together.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These new plans for the vintage boats are completely digital, including an STP file<\/a>, PDF files, and DXF files<\/a> of CNC cuts nested in groups by material thickness and type. Semi-professional boat builders and first-time builders alike can choose from a variety of designs and degrees of complexity. \u201cI want to create a bit of variation, so there\u2019s a boat for all people,\u201d Lee says. <\/p>\n\n\n

Expanding to New Business Opportunities<\/h2>\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Lee\u2019s burgeoning boat business started with modernizing the boat plans. But now he\u2019s expanding to more restoration work and designing new boats from scratch with a designer in the United States. They\u2019re still vintage and classic-looking. But underneath the surface, they have adopted modern construction techniques along with CAD<\/a> and CNC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt’s sort of keeping things classic but moving with the times as well,\u201d Lee says. \u201cThe designer does the boat structure framework and sends it to me. I effectively \u2018kit it\u2019 in Fusion 360 and turn it into nested parts<\/a>. I do all the jointing in the frames and make all the jigs and alignment items. Basically, with Fusion 360, I can turn it from a drawing into a kit of parts that you can then pass to a manufacturer to get the kit made.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lee even transparently shares his process on YouTube so that others can learn:<\/p>\n\n\n

\n