| Alvin |
02-15-2013 11:21 AM |
A Century of Automotive Style
Historically ALL CARS and TRUCKS have had the similar look and style at the time of their mfg. Nothing new here…really.
Quote:
It all goes back to shipbuilding
It’s no big secret that a lot of early motorcars took their body design from carriages. But it’s less obvious that carriage design evolved from shipbuilding. As with so many other arts and crafts, it all began with the Greeks.
In the 19th century, archeologists discovered mysterious lines scribed on the floors of Roman temples. What did these odd lines mean? The scholars discovered that they were the outlines of huge Roman ships, drawn in plan view (plan view means “as seen from directly above”). The smooth temple floors made an ideal surface to loft a ship’s hull full size.
The Greeks, Norsemen, Southeast Islanders and even some tribes of American Indians used a variation of this same idea.They would draw a full-sized hull outline on a sandy beach, plant sticks around the perimeter, and then connect the sticks with thongs. Finally they’d string more thongs diagonally across the hull to indicate the ship’s ribbing.The resulting “blueprint,” crude as it was, be-came the working drawing for a trireme, a packet or a war canoe.
These techniques worked well enough for the ancients, but as ships grew larger and more complicated, the blueprints had to be refined. For one thing, a simple plan view drawing gave the shipwright only a two dimensional, incomplete map to work from. What he really needed was a set of plans that showed in a way that workmen could read and follow.
So in the 1600s, European ship designers came up with a system for representing all three dimensions on a flat sheet of paper. This system involved basic geometry. Automobile stylists still use it today to map out autobody surfaces, but they now let computers do the mathematical calculations.
Once a ship’s designer had the ability to indicate to the carpenter or ship-wright exactly how the finished hull ought to be constructed, style started to enter the picture. Ships evolved from the tall, ungainly craft that sailed the ocean blue in 1492 to the sleek clipper ships of the mid-1800s. Amazingly, in that transformation, the fundamentals of ship-building didn’t change. What did change was that the ship designer-call him “stylist”-could and did get involved in the building process.
It’s easy enough to see that the design system that evolved for ships’ hulls carried over first into carriage building and then into auto body design. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the first step in designing a ship’s hull meant carving a scale “half model” from wood. A common scale was one inch to four feet, or 1/48. And the half model was exactly what it sounds like: not a representation of the entire hull but just half of it, split vertically down the middle and flat from the keel line up. This half-hull model was usually carved from a stack of planks, or layers. The planks fit tightly together, one atop the other, and they were held in place with tapered pegs that fit into vertical holes. The model did not have masts or sails
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Once this scale half-model was approved, the master builder would take the half-model planks apart and use the individual slices to make sectional full-sized drawings. In other words, the separate sections (planks) were all scaled up, or “lofted,” to full size. (The verb to “loft” grew out of shipyard parlance, because the only place where a ship builder’s shop had enough room to lay down the scaled-up outlines of a full-sized ship’s hull-enough clear floorspace, as in those Roman temples—was usually in the loft: the attic above the boat works. This was also the area where, at other times, most of the sails were cut and sewn.)
In the shipyard loft, the “loftsman”—the person in charge of scaling up the half-hull model—would first draw out the lines of each hull section and then, from those drafts, make full-sized templates, or “molds.” The ship’s carpenters and craftsmen in the shop below then used these templates to cut and size the wooden beams that formed the ship’s main framework. By using the same templates first on one side of the hull and then the other, the two halves of the finished framing came together as mirror images.
Now it’s important to recognize that any mistake the hull designer or the master builder might have made in his original scale model got magnified, often by a factor of 48 or more, when that model was lofted full size. And since any scale model always did contain surface flaws, it was up to the loftsman to “fair” the full-sized representations. Fairing meant, first and foremost, making an ungainly or flawed design efficient as it moved through the water. Fairing meant smoothing the surface, sculpting the lines, reshaping, streamlining the hull, because a smooth, streamlined hull made the ship go faster, and speed meant money. Speed made the ship more profitable. So profit became the main motive for fairing a hull.
But fairing also had an aesthetic component. The art of fairing meant that the loftsman had the authority to change the full-scale drawings and templates so the lines looked “right;” so that the hull had what was generally accepted as a “proper” shape. The hull should look pleasing; it should look graceful and “fair,” as in “a fair young maid.” A good loftsman had an eye for fairing, and his aesthetic sense was as critical to the design process as his ability to make the hull efficient. Fairing, then, became the act of combining efficiency with beauty
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And now we make that leap that allows us to recognize that the same techniques and processes used in ship design carried over into horse drawn vehicles. Carriages, like ships, needed to be efficient, but efficiency in this case didn’t mean streamlined; it meant light weight. A carriage had to be light. That’s because there was only from one to four horsepower to pull it.
Unlike ships’ hulls, the designing of carriages was almost never preceded by a scale model. It’s possible that a few carriage makers did use models, perhaps made of wood or sculptors’ clay, to help customers visualize what they were buying. But models weren’t common in carriage design, even in Europe. Rather, what carriage builders did was to first make detailed sketches, usually 1/10 or 1/12 scale, and the loft those sketches full-size on big, upright wooden panels.
To save space, the technique of lofting a carriage involved drawing a side view and then also superimposing half of a plan view on top of it. Both views were crammed onto the same board, and the drawings were kept separate and readable by being done in different colors. Offsets were called out on separate sheets of paper, and sometimes templates were made for the carriage body, but mostly not. This same technique evolved into the design and construction of automobile bodies and was used well into the 1980s.
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