About Woods Plans
About Woods Downloadable Plans
We now prefer to supply customers with downloadable copies of our plans. This requires less work for us to print and ship physical sheets of paper and as a result it's cheaper for you to buy them. We hope it is also more convenient for our customers because the plans are of course now available for instant purchase.
However physical printed plans are still available. You have to option to buy them printed or download the at the top of each design page.
Download files have been compressed so you may need the free WinZip or similar to open them. Most computers, however, are able to unzip without any additional files downloaded. Right click the folder when it is downloaded and select "Extract All...".
NOTE:
- Plans are only valid to build one boat.
- For security reasons each order is coded and must be downloaded within 48 hours. Also you are only allowed a limited few downloads.
- The plan prices are shown on the design pages and you will notice that the download plan prices are much cheaper.
Different types of plans
Before deciding which boat to build it's worth getting as much information as possible. So apart from this web site we have produced lots more to help you.
For example, after narrowing the choice down we suggest you purchase a "Study Plan" for each boat you are interested in. These comprise two large drawing sheets (A1 size). The first will be a scale general arrangement drawing and the second a sample sheet from the building plans. In addition you also get materials lists, photo sheets, etc
Free Sample Plans!
So that you can see how easy it is to download plans, and also so that you can see the high quality of our plans, we have a free sample package plan available to download. There are 3 plan sheets in this package; one sheet from the Pixie plans (sheet 2 of 3), one from the Strider plans (sheet 3 of 8) and one from the Mira plans (sheet 8 of 21). Together they show the mix of illustrations and dimensioned drawings that apply to all our plans. Some boats which we have built ourselves (Quattro 16, Wizard, Gypsy etc) also include photosheets to further illustrate the building process.
To download this free sample plan package please download this file:
Compared to paper plans
The downloaded plans are identical to the paper plans, as they are simply professionally scanned electronic copies of the original drawings. Thus the drawings are in Gif, Tiff or Jpeg file format. This means they can be read by any imaging program, for example you can use the "Image for Windows" or the "Microsoft Photo Editor" viewer available in Program Accessories. Typically a study plan file is under 1Mb and building plans are 2 to 10Mb
Although the printed plan sheets themselves are usually large, typically A1 size (approx 3ft x 2ft) you can usually read most of the information you require off the screen without printing them. Furthermore, the parts of the drawings that you do need to print will usually fit on a standard home inkjet printer. Having said that, Quattro 16 has full size patterns for the hull frames or bulkheads, so you will need to get those sheets printed out. Most good print shops can print out A1 sheets from a file on a CD. Please read the accompanying word files to ensure you print the full size drawings out at the correct scale!
Although when you buy study plans we will still offer advice to help you chose the design that best suits your needs, no consultation with the designers is included with the downloaded full building plans. Furthermore, these drawings must be considered for illustrative purposes only. Having said that, all the designs sold are tried, tested and proven, and they have all been successfully built by amateur builders all over the world without problems. So basically, "What you see is what you get."
However, you are not alone in your construction! You can get support and chat to other builders by visiting our forums here:
And if you run into real problems then it is possible to engage Woods Designs on a consultancy basis to help work through your problems, and in exceptional cases we may even be able to visit you on site.
If you are looking for inspiration you might also like this site which documents one couples home build of a Gypsy:
Download Notes
As the downloaded plans are "soft goods" like mp3's, software programs etc I am afraid: Download orders are final and not refundable. There is NO REFUND if the item is received by a successful download. So please ensure that you are purchasing the file(s) you want before completing your order!!
If the customer is unable to successfully complete a delivery to a computer AND Applies within THREE (3) calendar days of the initiation of the transaction a full refund of the purchase price may be credited to the users account. However if the WINZIP file appears to be defective, we will replace it with a file of the same title once we determine that the file was in fact defective, or at our discretion, send the paper plan equivalents at no extra charge.
Each download order (the download will be in a form of a WinZip folder which contains the files ordered) can be downloaded immediately after a confirmation that charges have been approved by our credit card processing centre. This usually takes less than a minute. Note: When making a payment the billing address where you receive your credit card bill must be entered otherwise your credit card charges will be declined.
When you choose to purchase our products you accept the Terms & Conditions of Sales. Please read our Terms & Conditions