Monday, April 15, 2002

First time boat building


Hello and welcome to my boat building blog, while the posts on this
blog are new the material is a few years old having originally been
displayed on another web which is now no longer functioning.
    This was my first boat build, its a design called Tango which I 
purchased from a company called Glen-L.
I'd never done this before so I really had to take my time with it. I had read a few books on the subject and figured it could be done. I came across the Glen-L company online and got the idea there that any average joe could build a boat, as long as he paid attention to the details and played by the rules and followed the plans.

Here's a few pictures of the work as it progressed, the image quality is not great, apologies for that, but I lost all the original pics of the earlier part of the build and had to use only the thumbnails.

It took me about two years to build Spirit, if i had to do it again I know it would be faster, there was a learning curve and it was built mostly with hand tools... I have long since changed to the more powerful and accurate ( for me ) machine tools which speed up the process greatly.

The opposite picture is from 2002, fitting the coachroof to the cabin.






Heres a picture of the roof and cockpit finished, Spirit has a mahogany plywood shell over a mahogany frame with cedar batons and chines. when complete the shell is encased in an epoxy fiberglass coat to protect and strengthen the boat.