Building Modern Backyard Boats

Choice of Materials

Whatever design you eventually choose, I hope you have decided to build it in wood. But although some boatbuilders are fanatic about wood only, and there is a school of thought proclaiming no  fiberglass or metal shall enter these halls, I'm not one of its pupils. Both glass and metal can produce superb boats, and both possess some advantages over wood. 

I've repaired or rebuilt a few glass dinghies and a badly mangled small glass sailboat, and repaired some aluminum runabouts, and each project was satisfying and had great results. Our thirty-year old 14' repair-job Laser is glass, and it has provided more fun and thrills over many years than words could ever describe. They are terrific boats for teaching kids to sail, wonderfully responsive, and from time to time you can remind them that when they can sail a Laser, they can sail anything.

The days and nights we three brothers and our wives spent sailing in Alan's fiberglass Beneteau 29 had to be close to boating perfection. We were on Cape Breton's Bras d'Or Lakes; sail anywhere, anchor anywhere, swim in warm water, with an amazing tidal rise and fall of only six inches. The Mi'kmaq Nation called it Pitu'pak—Long Salt Water—and that describes it perfectly, all many, many square miles.   

For an amateur fixing occasional holes or dents, glass is easy to repair. Grind the perimeter of the affected area into a feathered slope, and then simply add more and more layers of glass until the desired strength is reached. Foolproof, quick, and strong.

Building a whole hull out of fiberglass is a totally different matter. It is smelly and messy to work with, requires awkward headgear to hopefully remain healthy, and the finished boat will always be subject to serious condensation. New boats require a wooden mold. So why not put more time and effort into the mold, and make a boat? After all, you're making one boat, not setting up a production line.

Our 18' (now 17') Grumman canoe is aluminum, is the very definition of bulletproof, and is beautifully made, hundreds of rivets in ruler-straight rows. A couple of dinghies for our big boat were aluminum, and they were completely satisfactory.  The metal possesses incredible malleability.  A fellow shop teacher once returned a wrecked aluminum runabout close to its original shape with a hydraulic jack, some lengths of chain, and a come-along. The metal also has amazing resistance to corrosion and boat-eating toredos. It is a modern wonder material, but also cold to the touch, noisy in a chop, and suffers horrendous condensation.

Its main drawback, for the amateur builder, is that it requires heavy investment in welding machines, cutting machines, forming machines, the list goes on and on.

Amateurs have built successful boats out of steel, but, as with aluminum, don't even think of it unless you have years of experience, and the machinery at hand.

So that leaves us with wood, and this book assumes you will be using it. For the amateur builder, wood is surely the most logical choice.

Wood is readily available, pleasant to the hand and the eye, warm to the touch in cold weather, glues easily, takes a beautiful finish if you want one, resists condensation, and even the simplest tools can cut, shape, and drill it. It floats.

It absorbs engine noise, instead of magnifying it. Many longtime commercial fishermen, on both North American coasts, maintain it also absorbs some engine vibration, making their boats easier on human bodies than glass or metal ones.

From the environment's point of view, it is pure magic; no other material is self-perpetuating. It’s a fabulous insulator. It smells good. It looks good.

It’s infinitely recyclable. Six of the best vertical-grain planking strips in Working Girl came from a twenty-foot flat-grain red cedar two-by-eight which I liberated from a dumpster during a renovation at the Vancouver airport. Some amateurs have obtained perfect oak from demolished church pews. An English train engineer built his boat cabin with like-new cedar from a century-old railway coach which was being broken up. Old hotels have been born again in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of boats. High-quality Honduras mahogany paneling from our city’s Empress Hotel renovation became the decks of an entire fleet of high-powered, high-dollar inboard speedboats.     

Long lengths of wood, when it is clear and straight-grained, bend into fair curves. The old masters, building lapstrake hulls, often used only one mold, called a shadow mold, set at the future boat's widest part, and the planks would self-fair themselves into the boat shape. The Viking builders depended on this self-fairing ability, using no molds at all, and relying on braces down from the roof to hold the planks in place.

Modern wood-composite, which is wood with added exterior sheathing, is a great method of combining the advantages of wood—lightness, strength, self-fairing—with the advantages of glass or other sheathing materials, set in epoxy. The result is practically 100 per cent waterproof, has more resistance to racking, has abrasion-resistant hardness, and gives a consistent base for accepting paint.

Wood sheathed with glass on both its exterior and interior, particularly if the planking is very thin, as in canoes and kayaks, becomes the core of a truly composite structure, one which is stronger than the wood alone. The wood fibers form the center web of a thousand tiny I-beams.

Let's agree that, when talking of wood, we are including plywood. Although glued-lap ply construction requires cutting large sheets of ply into long strakes, there are many other boat designs which call for the simplicity and quick construction of sheet plywood.

Ben Seaborn's 26' Thunderbird design is one of the most famous. He designed it almost sixty years ago, and since then well over a thousand amateur builder/owners around the world have loved the easy handling and remarkable speed of these racer/cruisers. If you want to go cruising now, have lots of energy, but not lots of time or budget, used ones which need work are an economical way to get on the water.

18’ racer.  Photo by Eric Henseval

THIS INTERIOR PHOTO from France is a good example of what modern sheet plywood can do. It’s Aviateur 5.7, a fast 18-foot by 8-foot stitch-and-glue sailboat with a flat bottom and a 500-pound retractable keel. The entire boat is built out of nine mm. marine plywood. Note how the stitch and glue method yields extremely clean and uncluttered interiors. These partial bulkheads are the boat’s transverse strength – Eric calls them ‘empty’ bulkheads. If I squint my eyes almost closed, I can picture the sheet ply frames of skin-on-frame Mariah, and of the kayaks the school kids built. At first glance, cutting ‘empty’ bulkheads or frames out of sheet plywood seems like a waste of very expensive plywood, whether the boat is large or small, but the builder traces smaller bulkheads inside larger ones, and the result is surprisingly little wastage.

Many of Welsford's designs use sheet ply construction. It's a great material for a beginner—simple to buy, easy to handle, the factory has done the drying and the sanding, and the hull's shape evolves quickly. There’s less chance of a beginner losing hope, and abandoning the project. Unfinished hulls, rotting away in back yards, are sad but real.

Cold-molding is a process of gluing up several layers, usually three, of thin veneers of either plywood or solid wood. Its main advantage is producing a hull which is very strong for its weight. But the method is more complicated than it may sound, and requires a carefully-built mold to receive these layers. It also requires a lot of glue.

Amateurs have cold-molded very successful boats, but in most cases, they had previously built at least one boat using a more traditional method. If you're determined to plunge ahead, obtain a copy of John Guzzwell's book, which has become a bible for cold-molding builders. You'll meet him and the book later, in the Trekka chapter.

Each construction method could be affected by your particular situation. For example, if you have a stockpile of prime, vertical-grain wood which has been airdrying for years, then it may have found its perfect future home, in a carvel or traditional lapstrake boat.

If you'll be working in cramped quarters, then strip might be best, because of the flexibility of each individual strip. Produce the strips outdoors, then bend them around corners and staircases to get them into the living room or the basement.

One strike against wood is the possible harm by breathing the wood dust produced, especially when power sanders are used, since it is a carcinogen. Power sanding produces huge amounts of fine dust; try to confine such sanding to outdoors whenever possible. Good ventilation, either by working outdoors or by an efficient dust-extraction system, is essential. Wear a cartridge-type respirator when power-sanding, indoors and out.

Kurylko again:

A flat-bottom skiff is more likely to see completion than a carvel planked Whitehall with steam bent frames. Traditional lapstrake can be very challenging. Glued lap, less so. If an amateur is only going to build one boat in a lifetime, then the choice of construction method is critical, especially if the hull is shapely and of traditional form. Kits make this easier. If a fairly complex craft is desired, strip-planking is probably the most forgiving method of construction for a first time builder.

THE PHOTO IS OF WILLIE Wagtail, a Phoenix 3 design by Ross Lillistone, on an early morning in Australia. This is a plans boat; you’ll be cutting out the planks yourself, not having them shipped to you in a box. The boat is 15’ by 4’8", glued lapstrake marine plywood. Photo by Paul Hernes.

Wood comes in all shapes, sizes, and prices. When Brian was putting together the strip rowboat in his garage, each strip weighed about half a pound. Stored on the joists above his head, and worth well over a thousand of today's dollars, was a stunning plank which weighed almost two hundred pounds. A half-century earlier, he had been part of an Alaska work crew, laying a new wood wear deck on a ship which transported oil-drilling equipment. The planks were Honduras mahogany, one of the world's highest-quality hardwoods. The wood allows tracked vehicles, like bulldozers and excavators, to slightly cut into it, and thus maintain a firm purchase. With no wear deck, the machines would be sliding all over the actual steel deck when the ship was in heavy seas. These wood decks need to be replaced regularly.

At the conclusion of the job, as a souvenir of a job well done, the construction company gave each worker a plank from the old decking. Some of the ship's decks were still in superb condition. Brian's plank, twelve feet long, not even a scratch on it, has hung above his workbench for almost fifty years, waiting for the perfect use.

It is totally clear, vertical-grain, one foot wide and four inches thick. Something to ponder, when we're sawing the strakes for a lapstrake canoe out of marine plywood just over one-eighth inch thick. I recently heard of an incredibly light double-paddle canoe built of one-sixteenth inch aircraft plywood from Australia. The builder cut out the lapstrake planks with scissors.

Here are a few random paragraphs, from some boating writers, about the use of wood to create our magic floating sculptures.

Here’s Joseph Gribbens, one of the top people at the Mystic Seasport Museum in Connecticut, in chapter one of his The Wooden Boat:

A large part of the magic in most wooden boats is their beauty. Wood has such richness of finish, such sculptural potential, so much ability to be worked with subtlety, and maybe even a sort of soul that few other materials come even close . . .

Wood is the stuff for elegant small boats and bigger yachts, for dining tables and bedsteads and canoes. It seems an essential material for things made with art as well as with artifice . . .   Something else that attracts us to wooden boats . . .  these are things people have made with their hands and with relatively simple tools. There is hand-eye coordination in it. There are sometimes mistakes and compromises. There is worry. There is sweat. There is living and human involvement in every inch of a wooden boat.

Here is Ferenc Mate, (pronounced Mat-ay) author of at least eight books, including From A Bare Hull. He is writing about a famous Swedish boatbuilding firm, Vindo:

. . . when you’re down at the docks that are full of some of the finest all-fiberglass craft the world has to offer, your eyes wander until they find the glowing wood house of a Vindo and you say to yourself in quiet admiration, Now there is a real boat.

Here is shipwright Tony Grove, writing in a web article: 

I believe there will always be an irresistible true love by all people for wooden boats. When in the water they resonate a warm tone and a feel to the touch that only can be described as holistic medicine for the soul.

Here is Mate again. I copied down the sentence, but forgot to write down the name of the book:

If you ask most sailors to tell you in one phrase how they’d like their fiberglass boats built, they would tell you without hesitation, Out of wood.

Matthew Walker, in his coffee table book Welcome Aboard:

. . . marine-grade epoxy. Two revolutionary changes in wooden yacht design immediately took effect . . . a yacht builder could now laminate an entire wooden hull and its interior components into a single, incredibly stiff, lightweight shell . . . monocoque construction . . . .

John Guzzwell, in Modern  Wooden Yacht Construction:

. . .  .things with wood that were never before possible. This new engineering with wood exploits its many superb qualities yet also avoids its pitfalls, and the end result is a superior wooden structure that is durable, leakproof, and extremely strong for its weight.

Andy Hutchinson, owner of High Desert Dories, quoted in the online cortez.journal.com. He has built almost thirty of these unique sheathed-plywood thrill machines:

The newer composite construction does not require the ribs, and it is just as durable, more lightweight, and much easier to repair. Loaded with people and gear they have impressive stability in rapids.

John Gardner, in Building Classic Small Craft:

For some of us, the well-made wooden boat . . . is a thing of beauty, quite apart from its functional utility . . . it is enough to recognize the fact and acknowledge it. The creation of beauty is more satisfying and joyous than mere possession.

Kayaks and Choices   

Photo by Pygmy Boats

BUILDING THESE SLIM speedsters can be strangely addictive, and some first-time builders find themselves hooked for life. You can find a building space almost anywhere. I've built them, or helped youngsters build their own, in two living rooms, four basements, a private school, an empty warehouse, and classrooms in three different public schools. Materials are not expensive, they are simple to put together, quick to finish, light enough to lift on and off the building table. And on the water, pure magic.

Several methods can build a wooden kayak—kit, skin-on frame, stitch and glue, strip. Of the four methods, kits are the simplest, quickest, but the most expensive. Most of them are stitch and glue, which is the messiest method. Google kayak kits and you'll be reading for hours, because large numbers of kit boats are being sold around the world, most of them kayaks.

Computer-controlled cutting machines guarantee the funny-looking pieces will all fit perfectly, and putting them together helps make sense of the various steps behind boatbuilding. Building a boat from a kit is a safe way to test the waters of boatbuilding – you’re getting proven designs. One of the largest kit manufacturers, Chesapeake Light Craft in Maryland, has sold over 30,000 plans and kits.

If you have little woodwork experience, putting together a kit is an excellent way to end up with a good boat. Designers are continuously making the process more logical and foolproof. Many designs now have small tabs on the edges of bulkheads. These tabs fit into slots routed into the sides of the new boat, so the boat’s shape takes place almost automatically.

Also, most sections of sheet plywood which you join together to form the sides of the boat, now have jigsaw puzzle-shaped ends. There is only one possible way for the pieces to fit together, and once joined with epoxy, they are locked together for the life of the boat.

Another advantage of kits is that, like other stitch and glue boats, they don’t require a building table. Almost any support will do. A young friend with very low funds simply picked up three old wooden chairs which a homeowner had put out on a boulevard for free. He took them to his rented apartment, cut the backs off the chairs with a coping saw, and built a stitch and glue kayak using the three seats for its support.  

The above photo from Port Townsend’s Pygmy Boats features their Pinguino Sport Kayak, a light fifteen-foot stitch and glue kit boat, 36 pounds, surfing a standing wave in B.C.’s Skookumchuck Rapids. More about standing waves is coming up a few chapters from now. I love the firm’s present slogan: ‘Don’t Just Paddle It. Build It.’

Skin-on-frame, like my first kayak, is simple and straight-forward, but short-lived; fifteen years is about their average life. It's an easy building method, but from day one, they are wearing away from the inside out. Sand and grit work their way between the wood stringers and the skin, and there's no way to remove the sharp-edged stuff. It remains there, over the years silently chafing away at the one thing that is keeping the water out.

On the plus side, they are extremely light, often only a third or a quarter the weight of fiberglass kayaks. When lifting your boat onto car roof racks, or carrying it from the water to above high tide mark, this is no small difference.

If you choose this method, you have many choices for a skin. Cotton canvas, which I used for years, is readily available, but is heavier than the other choices and soaks up a lot of whatever you use for waterproofing. Aircraft dacron is the heat-shrinkable stuff used to cover the wings of light planes. It is light and  tough, and shrinks drum-tight and wrinkle-free at the touch of a warm iron. Ballistic nylon is the cloth militaries use to skin their inflatable boats, and is strong. It is usually sealed with a one-part urethane coating, or a two-part polyurethane one.

A friend used ordinary six-ounce fiberglass cloth, then rolled on epoxy for a strikingly transparent result. Clear mylar yields the same glass-bottom-boat effect.   

You also have choices for joining the pieces of framework together. I always used screws, since they worked well with simple frames cut out of half-inch plywood. Most skin-on-frame kayak builders use thin bent ribs, often of ash, and then peg and lash them to the light cedar or spruce longitudinals, with modern synthetic cord replacing the animal sinew used by the original aboriginal builders. I've never tried this. Surely nothing can beat it for total quietness in the workshop. Begin toughening up your fingers, and be prepared to buy a lot of cord. The lashing on some kayaks requires over a thousand feet.

Many websites and magazine ads offer skin-on-frame advice, plans, videos, supplies, and sometimes week-long courses, where for a reasonable sum you take home your own kayak. I'm not going to give a list, because the one which inevitably got left out, would probably be the best of the bunch.

Google some phrases like Inuit kayaks, Greenland kayaks, Aleutian kayaks, baidarkas (Russian for kayaks), skin boats, skin kayaks, and you'll have hours of reading and viewing. Some of the skin boats you'll come across in website photos, backlit by the sun and their skins translucent, are strikingly beautiful.

Do-it-yourself stitch and glue saves the expense of paying a factory to cut out the thin plywood pieces, but of course it is as messy as the kits are, because you're joining these pieces with glass tapes set in epoxy, and you'll do the same amount of sanding.

The result is precisely the same as from a kit, except you, and not a computer, are preparing the pieces. If you enjoy working with numbers, measuring, and drawing accurate lines, then skip the kit, save some money, buy a plan, and clean off the building table.

Strip takes the longest time, by far. It makes the heaviest boat, but the plus side is that you're working with pieces of real wood. The result, if you work carefully, can truly be a work of art. My 17’ strip kayak and 16' decked canoe are actually hybrids—strip sides and deck, joined with fiberglass tape/epoxy to glassed plywood bottoms. I felt this was stronger, and it let me avoid adding a small keel. Not having a keel may have saved three lives, as you'll read in Standing Waves.

Strip is a satisfying way to make the hours fly by, but there will be many of them. If you ever do decide to turn a stack of squiggly strips into a boat, along the way you'll be doing a lot of sanding. Make your best estimate for total building time, including obtaining the lumber, making strips, then air-drying them. Multiply this number by three or four, and you'll be close.

Some plans and kits are available which offer a hybrid boat—the sides and bottom are stitch and glue, but the decks are strip, and you can go crazy with contrasting wood colors, curves, inlays, whatever you wish. Some are just that, crazy, but a few are outstanding.

One suggestion applies to all these methods. Try to find someone who has built that exact kayak, either a friend or a boating magazine reviewer, and find out if he or she recommends it. Kits and designs are like anything else in the retail world, and they range from terrific to