Reddit reviews Epoxy Basics: Working with Epoxy Cleanly & Efficiently

A dinghy is quite a manageable project for a couple of people to build in weekends and evenings over the winter. It's a lot of work, but it's varied and you won't need to spend weeks doing the same thing so you see regular progress to keep you going. When you make a mistake, it's not too expensive to just cut that bit out and do it again.

Assuming you're using epoxy, you often spend an hour or two making a part and gluing it in place, then you have to leave it until the next day while it sets. That fits really well with hobby building. The gradual progress motivates you to do something almost every day, even if it's only half an hour.

Also, working with epoxy is a lot more forgiving than traditional wood work. It will easily fill gaps of a few millimeters and you can make epoxy fillets or even use glass tape to strengthen joints - there's no need for the complex joints of traditional wood work. Even adding glass cloth over wood is fairly easy - composites are only difficult when you're trying to mold something big like a whole hull.

Before starting an old design like a Contender, you should look around for a second hand one. It will probably be significantly cheaper than building. Renovating an old boat is less work than building, and almost as satisfying. Even a hull with terrible rot should have a trailer and rig, foils and sails that you could use, none of which you can make yourself and all of which is expensive.

For a new design like the Farr, remember that the hull is most of the work but only part of the expense. Cost the rig, hardware, sails and trailer before you start.

IMO, the best reason to build your own boat is when you want something really unusual, like a proa, or a small trimaran.

I highly recommend Russell Brown's Epoxy Basics - I wish I'd read it before I started.

You don't need a wood working shop full of big machines to build a dinghy but a few hand power tools are really useful. They don't need to be professional grade either, you're not going to be using them all day every day.

Do look after your working conditions - good lighting is important when you'll be spending hundreds of hours there. Ventilation too, as power tools make a lot of dust - a dust collector makes a huge difference but even a desk fan in the doorway and a dust mask helps. Ear defenders also make power tools a lot less unpleasant to use.

Take lots of pictures and keep a blog. It's a project you'll want to share and look back on.

Good books, with some notes:

Dierking's Building Outrigger Sailing Canoes Excellent reference for building any plywood boat, but you should be careful. This book will seduce you. Gary's an expert on making a single outrigger boat that works, is pretty, and is fast and easy to build. You'll buy the book to read and end up the next weekend heading off to Lowes to buy plywook, and ordering an epoxy kit from Raka. These boats are faster and more capable than anything but quite a big monohull, are simple to build, you can sail them yourself, on most of them you can take someone out with you, it's hard to see why anyone would build a ever build 15' dinghy instead of an Ulua or a Wa'apa, honestly, unless there was a racing class they wanted to get into. Highly recommended.

Payson's Go Build Your Own Boat Very good, very readable, some stuff that I still wonder about. Edge nailing into 1/4" ply, for example. How was that supposed to work? But the basic ideas of get it done fast and go sailing still apply.

Stambaugh's Good Skiffs Good, readable, interesting introduction to traditional heavy skiff construction as well as stitch and glue. The traditional methods are usually ignored, but if I were going to build a skiff I wanted to keep in the water I might pick that. The heavy skiffs sail really well, are enormously strong, are self-righting, they have a lot of advantages.

Andrew C. Marshall's Composite Basics Good intro to composite work. Technical but readable. Good reference.

Gougeon Bro's On Boat Construction Classic, necessary. Very good coverage of all kinds of stuff, really good.

Russell Brown's Epoxy Basics: Working with Epoxy Cleanly & Efficiently Expert level epoxy tricks. This is the stuff that will amaze people at the next messabout. Read the Gougeon Bro.'s book first, then read this.

Michalak's Boatbuilding for Beginners and Beyond Good. Kind of basic stuff, but if you need a book on figuring out centers of effort and basic rudders and boards and stuff it's fine. The boats are plain and kind of simplistic, but they sail fine. For the most part they don't go to windward in any kind of impressive way, but really who wants to be bashing to windward all the time anyway? They're not racing boats, and for dinking around they're great. Don't build his proa; no one ever has, and there's probably a reason for that. The rest of the boats range from fine to quite good (the Laguna is probably the best of his designs).

Bolger's Boats With An Open Mind Classic, great. A must-read. Even if you never build one you'll learn a huge amount from this.

Other Bolger books: 30-Odd Boats, Folding Schooner: And Other Adventures in Boat Design. Anything he wrote is worth reading. I mean, not the novel, but any of his boat books.

Parker's The Sharpie Book Very good intro to sharpies of all sizes.

Little known classics:

A 30', $6,000 Cruising Catamaran : Built, Sailed and Written About Hardcover – 1987 by Roy F. Chandler
I mean, don't pay $48 for it, but if you see a copy in a used bookstore it's worth a few bucks. Some of his 'tricks' for saving money don't translate very well ("My friend gave me this huge bucket of stainless hardware", hey, good idea! I'll try that), but it's a good general outline of turning a worn out racing cat into a small cruising cat on not much money.

Finally, for a lost classic: Chapman 's The Plywood Boatbuilder Vol 41 Excellent and readable look back at what early plywood designs and construction looked like forty years ago. I wouldn't build any of these, there are better designs around now, but it's fascinating to see how the thing developed. Designs for prams and dinghys, sailboats, outboard, runabouts, 47 designs, sailboats from 13 ft to 24 ft.

But really, a great and cheap way to read a lot about boatbuilding is to get hold of old copies of Wooden Boat or some of the other boating publications. You can often pick up a stack cheap or free. In depth articles, lots of pictures, I learned a lot from stacks of ten year old mags people gave me. In fact, I have a big stack of Wooden Boat and some other stuff I need to get rid of right now. Anyone want them? Free to good home, paypal me back the shipping when you get them. Send me a PM if you're interested.