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How does the word "spline" mean curved (and why not just use the word curved)?
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"tdacon" wrote: "David Howard" wrote in message ... Garrett Wollman wrote, on Mon, 06 Oct 2014 04:50:01 +0000: In woodworking, a spline is a long (and perforce rigid) bar of material used to join two grooved work pieces (essentially acting as a two-sided "tongue"), running cross-grain and providing greater strength than a simple butt joint by greatly increasing glue surface area. I suspect the same sense exists in metalworking as well. In the boat-building craft, a spline is a long thin strip of wood with very uniform bending characteristics. It's used in a process called lofting. In the days before computers did all this, the designer produced a table called a table of offsets, and the builder laid out the lines of the boat full-size on a large flat surface (often in the loft of the boat shop, hence the term lofting). The boat builder laid out the coordinates of points on the surface from the table of offsets, and then used the spline to fair the lines of the boat into fair curves. The builder would try to locate the spline so that it ran through all the points, holding it down in place with weights called ducks (hence the phrase "get your ducks in a row"). Because the table of offsets contained coordinates to no better than a sixteenth of an inch, and also because there were sometimes errors in the table, the builder would nudge the spline a bit here and there to end up with a fair curve that went through the points as closely as possible. Only from a fair curve could you bend a plank to match the lines of the boat. Tom Cool. -- charles |
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