One day in the distant future, I hope to enjoy the boat in the Hudson River from the mid-Hudson Valley down to the New York City harbor and the East River out to the Long Island Sound. The Bolero, with its 20 degree deadrise and over 24” of freeboard should handle these waters nicely. The 23’ Tahoe was a strong contender but as of now, I’ve decided on the Bolero primarily for its stern/v-drive engine configuration and the resulting cockpit layout.
One of the things that has made this choice difficult is the Bolero is one of the most under-represented designs on the forums and as a first-time builder, the lack of support from other builders here was and remains a concern. To partially overcome this and leverage my CAD background, I have decided to document an as-designed virtual build of the Bolero before beginning a modest redesign to modernize it a bit and bring it closer in-line to what I’m looking for. This exercise should also allow me to understand the design intent so any modifications I make will hopefully not adversely affect performance or build viability.
I also hope this will exercise will better document this design for others considering it and perhaps other builders who may choose to tackle a Bolero build one day.
In order to understand as closely as possible how the actual build might go, I’ve chosen to model the boat in a sequence and manner that will attempt to simulate a physical build as much as possible, allowing me to problem-solve as much as possible now before I move to the shop.
I began by having the full-size template (42” x 120”) scanned at 300dpi and then traced all the frames, transom, stem and breasthook in CAD, using faired nurbs curves where applicable. I took care to manually trace these extremely carefully and set an accuracy threshold of ½ the width of the “pencil” line which were literally about 5-6 pixels wide at that resolution.
I modeled the frames “flat” and then positioned them in 3D space snapping them into a pre-drawn grid of offset lines representing frame spacing, the setup level, designed water level, etc. The computer affords a level of precision I can only dream about in the shop and a curve that is 1/16” out of fair can be easily detected. I did make a decision to model the hull right-side up rather than the typical flipped configuration everyone is used to seeing however.
The Bolero plans lists frame #1 as the aft-most frame forward of the transom while the forward most frame is #8. The full-size templates for this design only show the inside face of the hull sheathing so there are a lot of offsets and head scratching to even get to the full frame profiles and I’ve already made a few mistakes I’ll detail later that would have resulted in firewood if I weren’t mocking everything up in the computer first.
I began lofting the chine logs and sheers last night and ran into some issues forward of frame 5. I’m going to track down exactly what’s going on will probably post a follow-up later this weekend or early next week. You can see the issue slightly in the following images where the sheer dips at frame 6:
I had an enormous amount of respect for the builders on this forum prior to beginning this exercise and can say it has already increased ten-fold since I began modeling this boat and I already fear "real world" fairing that 2.25” stem and the rest of the longitudinals I’m modeling now!
