Cliff wrote: It's Hull #2018; Sail #295 Still have the builder's plate on the transom coaming. The class # is hand scratched in as:"DS used" Also the waterline is molded into the hull. Idea of year?
Class and sail # are normally the same for the DS. Perhaps these were different in earlier years?
Nowadays, with HINs, the sail/class # is even part of the hull number. Things change.
The molded deck with the fake planks makes it an early model.
August 1963 they reached the 1,500th DS. Based on tom's calculation of a hull a day, at full capacity, assuming they averaged 300, it would take about 4 years to do 1200. At that point you are at August '59. Let things ramp up a bit more slowly, and tom's guess of '57/'58 is beginning to look good.
Meaning of "DS used"? An annotation that the sail number was based on the DS? Who knows - and who knows who did the scratching.