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Sarah’s Boat - The Adventure Begins

The plans arrived in the mail last week. The wood was purchased a few days later. So, it’s time to get to work! Construction began today on what will be (with a bit of luck) a beautiful little sailboat for Sarah (and ok, I’ll admit it, and for me too). The vessel we will be building (I say we because Sarah has stated emphatically that she will help, particularly with sanding and painting… she wants to paint the boat “all the colors that are real”) is a Jaques Martens “D5″ sailing pram, very similar to the popular Optimist sailing dinghy. The boat will be built using the stitch & glue construction method, which allows you to very quickly build extremely strong, light, and durable boats. I won’t go into a lot of detail regarding the construction method here, since you’ll be seeing how the mothod works as you follow a long on the construction of Sarah’s boat.

Step one was clearing out a work space in the disaster area that is our garage (my fault.. I can’t throw ANYTHING away, it seems) and then beginning the process of transferring the parts of the boat (”lofting”, in boat builder speak) from the plans to the Meranti (a variety of African mahogany) marine plywood that will be used to build the boat.

In the photo above you can see one of the sheets from the plans, assorted marking and measuring tools (if you’re going to build a stitch and glue boat, buy a large drywall T-square. It makes transfering measurements from the plans to plywood a LOT easier!).

After marking all the key measurements, corners, and line intersections on the plywood, it was time to “connect the dots”, which is easy when the lines are straight, but a bit more challenging when one needs to draw curves.

Based on advice from www.bateau.com, I bought a 10-foot length of Schedule 40 PVC pipe, which makes an excellent flexible batten to help draw fair (smooth) curves for curved panels, like the boat’s bottom and hull sides. Here you see the plastic batten laid out to mark the curve along one of the boat’s two bottom panels. Spring clamps helped secure the ends of the pipe along the edges of the plywood, and small finish nails at each of the points transfered from the plans ensured that the batten followed the appropriate curve. Next step: cutting.