A fantastic comprehensive guide to building boats for the amateurs and professionals alike. It will help the amateur to turn out a credible piece of work and aid the apprentice boat builder in learning his trade. If the instructions and methods within this book are followed carefully they will result in well constructed craft that will be seaworthy and weatherly. Profusely illustrated with diagrams and photographs.
An illustrated guide to wooden boat construction using WEST SYSTEM epoxy by pioneers in the field of wood/epoxy composite construction. Subjects include Fundamentals of Wood/Epoxy Composite Construction, Core Boatbuilding Techniques, First Production Steps, Hull Construction Methods, and Interior and Deck Construction.
This book serves as a workshop handbook; giving detailed instructions on how to go about each part of a job building a boat and its proper sequence, as well as what must be looked forward to, while performing a given operation. The advantages and disadvantages of each type of construction suitable for amateurs will be described.
This is the story of the author's apprenticeships with Japanese masters to build five unique and endangered traditional boats. It is part ethnography, part instruction, and part the personal story of a wooden boatbuilder fueled by a passion to preserve a craft tradition on the brink of extinction. Over the course of 17 trips to Japan, Douglas Brooks traveled over 30,000 miles to seek out and interview Japan's elderly master boatbuilders; he built boats with five of them, all in their seventies and eighties, between 1996 and 2010. For most of them, Brooks was their sole and last apprentice. Part I introduces significant aspects of traditional Japanese boatbuilding: design, workshop and tools, wood and materials, joinery and fastenings, propulsion, ceremonies, and the apprenticeship system. Part II details each of his five apprenticeships, concluding with a poignant chapter on Japan's sole remaining traditional shipwright. This fascinating book fills a large and long-standing gap in the literature on Japanese crafts, and will be of interest to boatbuilders, woodworkers, and all those impressed with the marvels of Japanese design and workmanship.
Everybody has the dream: Build a boat in the backyard and sail off to join the happy campers off Pogo Pogo, right? But how? Assuming you aren't independently wealthy, if you want a boat that's really you, you gotta build it yourself. Backyard boatbuilding has its problems. Building in fiberglass is itchy, smelly, and yields a product that yachting maven L. Francis Herreshoff once called "frozen snot." Ferrocement, once all the rage, has pretty much sunk from favor, if you catch the drift. But there's still wood, right? Ah, wood. Nature's perfect material. You can build in the time-honored traditions of the Golden Age of Yachting, loving crafting intricate joints in rare tropical hardwoods, steaming swamp oak butts to sinuous shapes, holding the whole thing together with nonferrous fastenings that cost a buck or better each. Does that sound like boatbuilding for everyperson? What about the currently fashionable wood/epoxy boatbuilding? You butter regular old wood with Miracle Whip, stick it together in the shape of a boat, and off you go, right? Epoxy works, but They don't exactly give it away; nor is it exactly a benign substance. Suiting up like Homer Simpson heading for a fun-filled day at the nuclear power plant isn't exactly the aesthetic boatbuilding experience many of us are looking for. Where does that leave us? In the capable hands of George Buehler, who honors the timeless traditions of the sea all right, but those from the other side of the boatyard tracks. Buehler draws his inspiration from centuries of workboat construction, where semiskilled fishermen built rugged, economical boats from everyday materials in their own backyards, and went to sea in them in all kinds of weather, not just when it was pleasant. Buehler's boats sail on every ocean and perform every task, from long-term liveaboards in Norwegian fjords to a traveling doctor's office in Alaska. This book contains complete plans for seven cruising boats--from a 28-foot sailboat to a 55-foot power cruiser. All the information you need is here, including step-by-step instructions honed by nearly 20 years of supplying boat plans to backyard builders--and helping them out when they get into trouble. Buehler is anarchic, heretical, and occasionally profane; his book is West Coast counterculture meets traditional hardchine workboat construction, leavened with hardnosed common sense and penny-pinching economy. This book is for those who look around them and see that much of what is done in the world today--whether in yachting or politics or economics or interpersonal relationships--is based not on logic but on conforming and meeting other people's expectations. This book is most definitely NOT about either. It is about the realization of dreams. If you believe that everyone who wants a cruising boat can have one . . . If you see beauty beneath the fish scales and work scars of a commercial fishing boat . . . If you want to build a simple, rugged, economical, good-looking cruising boat--power or sail--using everyday lumberyard materials and few skills other than perseverance, this is the book for you. Buehler's Backyard Boatbuilding tells you how to build extraordinary boats using the most ordinary skills and materials, with complete plans, instructions, and specifications for seven real cruising boats ranging from a 28-foot sailboat to a 55-foot power cruiser. "Build wooden boats the Buehler way, which is to say inexpensively, yet like the proverbial brick outhouse."--WoodenBoat Richly flavored with personal advice and anecdotes as well as a wealth of valuable information."--American Sailing Association "Everyone will revere this book."--The Ensign
The inaugural title in our exclusive new series of books about traditional boats and traditional seamanship. Wooden boats didn't disappear with the invention of GRP. Building them is a classic craft that attracts people with a keen interest in traditional boats and is a thriving activity amongst professional craftsmen and DIY boatbuilders alike. This thoroughly modern book aimed at the novice builder and accessible to the amateur takes a fresh new approach to a timeless activity. The focus is on classic boat construction and restoration, but at all stages modern methods, materials and techniques are employed, together with step-by-step diagrams and explanations. Well illustrated with colour photos and detailed close-up watercolour illustrations, this book will be invaluable for students of boat design and construction, do-it-yourself boatbuilders and even modelmakers. A landmark in wooden boat building books.
