Strip planked Fenwick Williams Catboat at Port Vincent Boat show
More photos of Fenwick Williams Catboat built in Strip Plank by David Wilson at Duckflat, Adelaide
More photos of Fenwick Williams Catboat built in Strip Plank by David Wilson at Duckflat, Adelaide
A 12lb canoe. The idea was to build a Rushton Wee Lassie in balsa strip with very light glass. The boat ended up being fairly durable despite not being interested in durability. As far as I was concerned I was going to be happy if it lasted a couple of years before being chucked into a dumpster somewhere. But five years later it was still beautiful despite good use.
A Fenwick Williams catboat carefully reinterpreted in Cedar Strip. Includes cleaner structure, optimised foils and a tabernacle rig that allows raising of the mast by one person. Built by David Wilson at Duck Flat Wooden Boats in Adelaide.
A whole bunch of strategies for lightweighting a plywood stitch and glue canoe. In this case a Storer Boat Plans Eureka Canoe. Standard build is around 44lbs. Ten lbs were saved to bring the weight down to 34 or 15k
How sailing and paddling canoe shapes differ.
How traditional canoe designs work really well and a lot of modern ones don’t.
Building a canoe – is ply or cedar strip better?
How to build a lightweight canoe – selection of materials – ply vs strip plank and timber species
Books for canoebuilding.
IMPACT! How hard is your boat going to hit something. For most of us it won’t be very hard at all. So it is better to save weight. For expeditioners they may require a lot more from their boats. What are the strategies one can think about?
We first started to see Paulownia becoming available from Plantations in Australia around 2004. Well before the current boom in its use for framing and hulls of dinghies, yachts and other boats. Paulownia is a very lightweight timber from China that provides one way of building lightweight boards and boats. How to overcome its weaknesses and make use of its strengths.
Never join boat decks the way you join up panels in a house. Cracks and big failures will result.
Torture boards are used for the highest grade of smoothing for visual smoothness of the whole structure. Fairing a strip planked hull.
Fairing a join between adjacent plywood sheets in a hull or deck.
Fairing a composite structure
Fairing deck substructure. Deckframes and deck stringers ready to take plywood.
Ultralight strip planked boats using Paulownia, Balsa and Western Red Cedar. Superlight Eureka Canoe and Goat Island Skiff and the amazing 12lb balsa canoe
Most epoxy mixes are 2 to one resin and hardener. Or 4 or 5 or 6 to 1. Some companies offer 1:1 and push ease of mixing. But are they a good choice?
I am in the Philippines at the moment.
I took five days out to go to the area where one of my Australian Filipino friends has her hometown. The general area is Laguna, I was staying at Lumban and nearby was a canoe trip to Pagsanjan falls.
I was really interested to see the local boats and to see how they might relate to the timber boats that existed previously. The boats are elegant and very well suited to their environment. Paddling and motor canoes are used on a daily basis.
How much fibreglass is really necessary to prevent damage to a plywood boat for most users?
For a long time I’ve been suspicious that both designers and builders are in a never ending spiral of more and more heavier fibreglass.
I argue, with data from the Turner designed Jarcat, that the weights of glass are clearly excessive for most uses and users of small boats.
One of the most important things as a designer or sailor is to keep an open mind, but also to be able to analyze things in light of real experience and prior knowledge. These are online and paper resources that force thinking in different ways.
This article, after a bit of a spiel, goes on to give some great resources that “opened my eyes” at different times in my life.
They focus on areas of structural design, sailing, sail aerodynamics and touch on a bit more.
I built the Quick Canoe in a day and a half. This is way slower than some of my customers.
It is the first time I have been disappointed building a complete boat this quick.
The risk of high expectations!
But a day and a half with the problems I had is pretty good.
Melanie in the UK wrote to me. She has just bought an old Mirror dinghy and started sailing for the first time.
Problem is that the boat leaks and she doesn’t want to stop using the boat until the end of the season.
I have a philosophy of keeping older boats on the water and not pulling them off for months on end until you have the time to do the job.
So the article here is useful to see what can be done with an old leaky plywood sailing dinghy to keep it going.
It is perfect sailing weather at the moment in the UK and it is better she is out there learning but with the worst of the leaks gone.
With a disciplined approach she should be able to get all of this done in a week or so. The general leaks fixed permanently and the rotted area reinforced so that the boat won’t break.
This podcast/mp3 talks about why Australian (and New Zealand) wooden boatbuilding is different from the rest of the world..
Click to listen to the talk. This is the third of three.
This is the second of my talks in the USA. It focuses a bit more on construction and some of the methods that can be used to keep a boat light and simple, but very strong and stiff.
It also discusses how there is a “creep” in boatbuilding and design that increases the weight of boats way over what is really needed for a strong structure.
We have moved much of our activity to the Facebook Groups. See the links in the Menu above. But there are so many great questions asked and discussed on the Oz Woodwork Forums..
Peter Hyndman has been building his Eureka Canoe forever. I think it is still not finished – however he did document it beautifully