Christian Stark, a mechanical engineer, fell in love with the Schooner Zodiac after he took a cruise on the 90-year-old ship with his family in 2012. He enjoyed it so much that he became a volunteer crew member. But it wasn’t until subsequent trips that he realized the ship wasn’t symmetrical. According to the captain, the port and starboard tacks were perceptibly different, probably a result of port side structural damage from the boat’s days as a pilot ship in San Francisco Bay from the 1930s to 1970s.
It’s an issue that could be corrected in future renovations, but you’d need blueprints to do it. Unfortunately, any Schooner Zodiac’s blueprints were destroyed in not one but two fires at two separate architect and boat yard offices.
As serendipity would have it, Christian met Ross Nairn, a mechanical engineer with a background in metrology, on a voyage. Together Ross and Christian decided they could create blueprints of the Schooner Zodiac where none existed using a Faro Focus3D scanner 3D Systems’ Geomagic Design X, which combines 3D scan data processing with history-based CAD to create fully-functioning CAD solid models.
Click here to read the full case study of the Schooner Zodiac.