Reader Built Boats Articles - Page 4 of 5

While this is the scene Bruce has been hoping for, the boy is not a grandson, it's his office manager's son.

August 2017

PETIT BATEAU

A boat, boredom, a book, and a baby

With a grandchild on the way, Bruce Holaday built a Joel White-designed Shellback Dinghy. When the boat was finished and launched he was reluctant to leave the project behind so he wrote a book about a boy named Jack whose grandfather built a boat for him.

The loose-footed sprit sail makes sailing about as simple as it gets. Light summer breezes make for unhurried passages between islands.

July 2017

IRONBLOOD

Transforming the Traditional

After moving ashore from living aboard a schooner, and acquiring a wife and a small son, Michael Colfer of Bellingham, Washington, needed a smaller boat. He built a Nutshell pram and a Good Little Skiff, but then wanted a boat capable of taking on some more challenging weather in the more exposed areas around the San Juan Islands.

June 2017

A Bit of Venice on the Thames

An Englishman's S'ciopon

Richard Nissen lives in a houseboat on the Thames and has gathered a collection of small boats. After he visited Venice and learned how to row in the Venetian style, he decided he needed one more, and built a s’ciopon, a small traditional workboat that he could row standing up.

May 2017

A Tenacious Tween

Building a Jericho Bay Lobster Skiff

A girl who had her heart set on having her own outboard skiff had enough determination to see a three-year project of building a Jericho Bay skiff through to the end. In our Reader Built Boat feature you’ll meet Hannah Dumser, a remarkable youngster who was thrilled to get epoxy for her birthday.

Thatcher has a powerful stroke with good torso rotation, not to mention the game face of a kid with no shortage of determination.

April 2017

Boy Scout Boatbuilder

A CLC Night Heron

This stitch-and-glue kayak is the handiwork of a 13-year-old Boy Scout in pursuit of a Merit Badge in woodworking. He could have fulfilled the requirements for the badge by building a box with a hinged lid; the 18’ stitch-and-glue kayak he built was above and beyond.

March 2017

STILL THINKING

A Redwing 18

Barry Dusharm had built a few boats for rowing and paddling, so when he made the switch to power he built a Redwing 18 he named it STILL THINKING, the answer he’d given his wife when she asked if it would be his last boat.

The yawl rig has advantages beyond those for sailing. The two masts support a fly that can be set open for shade and a cooling breeze, or...

February 2017

FIRE-DRAKE

A sail-and-oar cruiser

When Alex Zimmerman decided to build a camp-cruising boat for himself, he applied his mechanical engineering training to use and started by crunching numbers. What he ended up with, FIRE-DRAKE, is a lapstrake boat that is as much a work of art as of science.

January 2017

EMZARA

A Jericho Bay Lobster Skiff

John Adamson visited the WoodenBoat campus in the fall of 2009 and was taken by two Jericho Bay Lobster Skiffs: the original plank-on-frame version built by Jimmy Steele in the early 1970s, sitting on a trailer parked in front of the WoodenBoat Store, and a strip-planked version built by Tom Hill, at anchor near the WoodenBoat boathouse. A few years later he built one for himself.

The post at the stern supports two mirrors; the larger one at top provides a good view forward, and the wide-angle mirror below it takes in a broader view. Mirrors are common fixtures on rowing boats used in races in Finland.

December 2016

SULKAVA

A kit-built Savo 650

Tim Murfitt of Norwich, England, has been puttering with small boats, mostly power boats, for more than 40 years and grew weary of their speed and noise. He thought taking to the water with a pair of oars would be a good change of direction for his boating, and although his only experience with rowing was on dry ground with a rowing machine, he felt confident that he’d enjoy rowing. He wasn’t so sure that his wife would.

After launching JANET MARIA it was't lnog before Haynes was back in his garage workshop. He's now building a Mertens-designed 10' pram.

November 2016

All in the Family

A grandfather's Pilot 19

Joe Haynes grew up in Detroit with three brothers and two sisters. Their father, once a tight end for the University of Michigan football team and later an Army sergeant who stormed beaches in the Pacific during World War II, was a very athletic man, but in spite of his best efforts to get his kids involved in sports, none of them showed any interest. The family moved to Algonac, a small town tucked in a bend of the St. Clair River, which flows from Lake Huron to Lake Erie and separates the state of Michigan from the province of Ontario. Surrounded by water, the kids gravitated to boats. The first boat in the family was a derelict wooden boat Joe and his twin brother fished out of the river near their home. They patched the leaks with tar and used the boat to explore the river upstream and down.

Students from the Andrea McCoy Recreation Center constructed the aptly named ANDREA McCOY. McCoy. a New Bedford resident, was among the talented young USA boxers killed in a 1980 plane crash in Poland.

October 2016

Bevin’s Skiffs

Building more than boats

Kids at the Community Boating Center of New Bedford, Massachusetts, built three Bevin's skiffs as part of a program to teach valuable skills through boatbuilding.

Nate was used to sailing a sloop and found that the trimming of the sails on the schooner had more impact on steering than speed.

September 2016

BOB

A Boat on a Budget

Nate Morrison’s Shell Schooner 18, christened BOB for Boat On a Budget, proves that limited skills, limited tools, and unlimited dreams can get you afloat even where water is scarce.

Dave made paddles for the canoe and decorated them with the same insignia he put on the canoe. He and his friend Andy Look won the wooden canoe division of the 13.5-mile Abe's RIver Race on the Sangamon River in Illinois

August 2016

Hope and Memories

A canoe to live for

An Illinois man given a second chance at life decided to recreate some of the best times of his youth by building a canoe. Working side-by-side with his 82-year-old father, he created a vessel for the future he almost lost.

The Candlefish has comfortable seating for the family and plenty of freeboard.

July 2016

LADY LOUISE

A Candlefish 13

Small Boats Monthly reader Scott Rowley read about the Candlefish outboard skiff in our April 2015 issue and decided it not only would be a good tender for his sailboat, but also better suited than his car for taking his family of four, not to mention the dachshund, out to dinner and visiting friends near his South Puget Sound peninsula home.

June 2016

ELLANDELL

After his kids were grown, Elliot Arons had plenty of free time but spent a lot of it planted in front of the TV. A dream of building a sailboat and a Penobscot 17 kit from Arch Davis got him off the couch.

When Sean's friend Robert saw the lines for the little double ender, he said: "We have to build that!" And together they did.

May 2016

SWEET PEA

An idea takes shape

Reader Sean Russel has been designing boats for a long time, at first drawing by hand and then using computer programs. Our Reader Built Boat is SWEET PEA, a peapod-like boat he designed and built to fit in his van.

“That boat is so damned beautiful, it’s making the rest of us look bad.”

April 2016

MOJO

A PT Skiff kit

After 8 months abuilding, a Port Townsend outboard skiff built from a kit as a post-retirement project handles all the conditions she has encountered like she’s been there before.

March 2016

ERGED ON II

A retired electrical engineer combines modern lithium batteries with a 90-year-old runabout design and becomes an electric-boat race champion.

The skiff's concave run is as effective as trim tabs in keeping the bow down at speed.

February 2016

A Lapstrake Jericho Bay Lobster Skiff

Designed for Maine, Built for North Carolina

True to the shape of the original carvel-planked hull, this lapstrake version has an intentionally hogged bottom to get it up on plane quickly and keep the bow down.

January 2016

A Dragonfly Rowing Shell

Speed with a dash of stability

This Steve Killing-designed shell was built by an Arkansas retiree with an interest in learning to row and the patience to plane rolling bevels on every 23’-long strip.

December 2015

From Aerodynamics to Aesthetics

Building Soap Box Derby Racers and Stand Up Paddleboards

A serial stand-up-paddleboard maker got his start doing strip-built construction in an unlikely place—soap-box derby cars—and three decades later shifted his focus to artistic expression in wood.

The deck is strip-built, alternating western red cedar with white pine; the trim is walnut.

November 2015

A Diminutive Fantail Launch

A kayak fisherman's fantasy

Sandy MacKenzie enjoys fishing from kayaks, but putting his fishing rod down to pick up the paddle began to wear on him. He scouted about, without success, for plans for a canoe or a kayak with pedal or electric power that would leave his hands free for fishing. He had built a few kayaks and felt confident in his boatbuilding abilities, so he decided to take a chance on coming up with a design himself, something quite different from anything he’d seen.

The 6mm Vendia planking has four of its five veneers running lengthwise; it easily twisted to meet the stems.

October 2015

WENDY

A Gartside rowing skiff made of an unusual wood

The laminated planking from Finland seemed like the future of lapstrake boatbuilding, but it may have been an idea whose time has not yet come.

September 2015

SAOIRSE

A sharpie skiff

A Reuel Parker sharpie skiff was the realization of a New York boy’s dream to have a boat of his own. For a half century the dream was only a dream, but when a pile of lumber was delivered to his Florida home, it was finally time to do something about it.

August 2015

GOOD’NUFF

A customized Caledonia yawl

Five years in the making, it was part of a Wisconsin man’s 10-year plan to prepare himself for retirement, but before he could get started on the yawl he had to build a bigger garage.