Thank you @brok09 for sharing.
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Wow! What a fascinating project! Thank you for sharing your process.
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Grockā¦first saw that word used in a SI-FI book I was reading on the way to Vietnam.
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Stranger in a Strange Land. Robert Heinlein. 
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Yep!
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I would be interested to see how AutoCAD etc. 3D-software that can unwrap or unfold a truncated elliptical cone result would compare to my geometrical route for the 2D development.
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Freeship might. Real unwrapping would be hard in most 3d software. Possibly Blender. AutoCAD and others could be hand measured or the like, possibly using Lisp but unless it has become a thing in recent versions only Freeship had real unwrapping from the start.
I would too. Iām extremely impressed though when someone does it the old-fashioned way and calculates it outā¦Iām not sure I would care to tackle a cone or ellipse.
I found a YouTube showing how to unwrap a cone using Fusion 360. It uses Sheet Metal and one trick was to slit the cone with a tiny gap from top to bottom. Then use the unwrap function.
Fusion 360 also shows unwrapping non-developable surfaces, e.g. leather car seat covers that have curvature in more than one direction. This was done in sections.
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I have only used Freeship for boats but it could be used for any symmetrical design.
This boatā¦
becomesā¦
that one could cut say plywood or similar and make a good boat.
This was tricycle design I was playing withā¦
Thinking mostly Ripstop and mylar stretched over thin fiberglass poles.
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Fusion360 has a sheet metal function that will unfold a design to flatten it. It will also use material-specific k-factors to account for the material used in a bend so the resulting piece will be true to size.
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