The Boatyard Book is a practical, comprehensive reference manual that provides sensible, accessible advice for boatowners on planning and carrying out annual maintenance, repairs, upgrades and refits of sailing yachts and motorboats, up to 20 metres in length. Beginning with all the information owners will need to care for their boat, including how to budget and plan tasks to be done through the year, The Boatyard Book goes on to help them choose the best boatyard for their needs, then provides essential how-to reference material and ideas for a comprehensive range of projects large and small to be carried out ashore. There's advice and tips from highly respected boatyard owners, specialists and surveyors, as well as from the author's own 25 years' experience of boat ownership, all fully illustrated with step-by-step photos and illustrations. Topics covered include: - laying up - hull and deck care - mast and rigging - sail care - engines - electrics - maintenance of plumbing and gas systems - more complex projects, including re-wiring a boat, overhauling an engine, how to treat osmosis and how to go about a complete refit. This is a book to be kept at the yard, or on the boat, and used time and time again by those who are either happy to keep things ticking along with the minimum of effort or by those who want to get stuck into bigger projects.
There are fewer than 10,000 wooden boats in America, but the circulation of WoodenBoat magazine exceeds 180,000. What is it about these boats that has captured the popular imagination? With his "lively blend of reportage [and] reflection" (Los Angeles Times), Michael Ruhlman sets off for a renowned boatyard in Martha's Vineyard to follow the construction of two boats-Rebecca, a 60-foot modern pleasure schooner, and Elisa Lee, a 32-foot powerboat. Filled with exquisite details and stories of the sea, this exciting exploration of a nearly forgotten craft and the colorful personalities involved will enthrall wooden boat owners as well as craftspeople of every stripe, nature enthusiasts, and fans of compelling nonfiction.
Tells the unlikely story of Silicon Valley through the life of one of its great achievers--Jim Clark, who founded Silicon Graphics and Netscape and may be on the verge of another trillion-dollar company.
This is the story of Ross Gannon and Nat Benjamin and the Gannon and Benjamin Marine Railway where the sailing vessel Rebecca was designed and built. Gannon and Benjamin is one of only a few full-time boatyards in the United States devoted exclusively to the design, construction, repair, and maintenance of traditional, plank-on-frame wooden boats--Publisher's description.
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
Tells the story of Doug Von Allmen's plan to build an extraordinary yacht and the way that the 2008 financial crisis threatened the project and the livelihood of the one thousand employees of the shipyard where it was built.
This true story documents the extraordinary life of an "Every Man" who came from humble beginnings to realize substantial accomplishment in spite of harrowing experiences and difficult circumstances.Ed Freeman's birthright family trials and tribulations begin when his great-grandfather is abandoned at as a newborn on a pastor's doorstep in North Carolina in 1833. The baby boy grew into a young man and ended up fighting in the US Civil War, later migrating to the Great Plains where the family made a living connected to all things turning up dirt, tilling and plowing the rolling hills of Nebraska. At the end of the 1930s Dust Bowl the baby boy's great-grandson, young Ed Freeman, escaped a forced arrangement during the Great Depression in the middle of a freezing cold winter night by hopping on a railcar headed west, joining the ranks of hoboes and eventually settling in the coastal mountains of Oregon where he could be his own man in a land of opportunity. Leveraging the work ethic, skill sets, and accumulation of life experiences that typified the high quality tradesmen they had become, in 1969 Ed Freeman and his son Dugie formed a company that would build custom all welded commercial fishing boats in the small Pacific Coastal town of Gold Beach, Oregon. During the 1970s they were constructing the biggest aluminum boats built in the United States and specialized in markets of the Pacific Northwest including Alaska. The Freemans found dignity in taking on the jobs nobody else wanted and made things work no matter what. Over the course of the little firm's short life (12 years), the boats they built had a combined length of nearly four football fields and a total vessel weight of more than a million pounds. This is a straight-forward American story, both interesting and instructive, that is neither simple nor complex. It puts a face to personal struggles, applies respect that effort, creativity, hard work, absorption, reflection, striving, and persistence deserves, and connects a larger sphere of influencers that contributed to their success.
