Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome!

Welcome.  I hope you're in the right place.  This blog will be about the design and construction of a 16ft daysailer that I've just started building.  "Belle", I call her, and I hope she lives up to her name.   I should warn you that I've never blogged before, so please forgive the occasional blog-blunder.

I'm going to start, not at the beginning, which would be sensible, but where I am now:  lofting the boat.   (If you like, you can see a little background about me and this boat at the end of this post.)  Since this is a brand-new design, I wanted to make sure I had a really fair set of lines to begin with.  My original sketches for the boat were done on 11x17 paper, which is too small to directly scale.  In other words, the width of a pencil line on the sketch could easily be 1/2" on the boat, easily visible to the naked eye.  I borrowed an idea from Harry Bryan (I think it was in WoodenBoat magazine 196) to loft the profile and plan view at 1/4 scale, where 3" on the drawing is 12" on the boat.  I got a piece of mylar for the these lines, but I used a cheap piece of luan plywood (painted white) for the body plan, which is drawn full size.  This body plan is used to make the molds that are then used to build the boat.  Yes, there are a few preliminaries to take care of before the sawdust flies!

I'll have more info. on the design in a later post--I'm going to try to post new entries and photos weekly--but for now here's a brief rundown of the basic specs:

Length -- 16'
Beam -- 6'
Draft -- 9"
Rig -- gaff sloop, approx. 125 sq ft
Displacement -- approx. 720lb including crew (to DWL, Design Water Line)
Construction -- epoxy glued lapstrake

The body plan is drawn full size.  This will be used to make the molds, which will then be used to build the boat.  Got it?

Hmm, I suppose a block of wood wedged between the table and the batten can be used to add a bit more "English" to this curve... 

The batten I'm using is actually made of carbon fiber which turns out to make excellent battens.  Left over from a spar-building project a while ago.

Believe it or not, you're looking at +$200 of epoxy goos and supplies.

Here's the final lines drawing, drawn out at 1:4 scale on mylar.   Later, I'm going to have this drawing shot down to 11x17 format for easier reproduction.

Here's a hand-drawn version of the lines drawing.  Once the boat is done I'll make a new version of it and various construction drawings showing all the updates and ideas incorporated during construction.

OK so I didn't clean this one up, here's part of one of my sketches, where I work out various details of Belle's construction in my mind and on paper.

So that's it for now.  I hope to have some decent drawings of the boat next time, plus some photos of various fun things like transom patterns, a glued-up stem, and a setup at least starting to come together.

By the way, if you've gotten this far and are still interested in the mysteries of lofting, Chapter 7 of Greg Rossel's Building Small Boats is excellent on the subject. (Good all-around book too.)

A little background...

I sold my last boat, a 13' Joel White Pooduck, a couple of years ago and agonized through last summer without a boat which was a horrible experience not to be repeated.  (A terrific boat, and fun to build, I really have no idea why more Pooducks haven't been built.  You see Shellbacks by the dozen all over the place, but I've never seen a Pooduck in the wild except for mine.) There are loads of used boats for sale around here (coastal Maine), so I suppose if I was sensible I would have just bought one of those and been done with it. But, alas, I build wood boats for a living in Brooklin Maine and that thought was furthest from my mind!  I am really fortunate to have an understanding boss who is letting me build my boat at his shop.  So if any of the photos look suspiciously professional, that's why.  But, I assure you, this project is all me, win lose or draw.  Over the years, in my spare time I've built Pooduck, a couple of Nutshells, a Bolger 20ft cat-yawl and, years ago, an Optimist pram, but this is the first boat I've designed for myself. So failure--or world-astonishing success!--is all mine to enjoy, gulp.  I'm hoping she'll be an interesting blend of old and new that people will find intriguing.  She'll have some "old" features like nice steam-bent coamings, but also some "new" ones as well such as modern epoxy lapstrake construction.  My main inspirations for this boat have been: myriad Bolger boats, Spartina and the lapstrake Chebacco, to name only two; the wonderful Herreshoff 12-1/2s and other classic daysailers; and Joel White's Pooduck.