The Boat

Three years ago a buddy of mine asked if I’d be interested in building a boat. What “kind” of boat I asked. Where upon we launched into a discourse that lasted several months and included copies of “Wooden Boat” magazines and lots of other visual aides. Dreams of mahogany run-a-bouts filled my head…my labor, his funding.


Well we settled for something a little more practical… he bought a 76 walk-thru windshield fiberglass boat, with a good motor and a sound hull.
Didn’t look like much, what with the plastic lawn chairs screwed down in the interior. We left them with the prior owners…

So we dropped off the motor at his house and dragged the carcass to mine.

Lets just say it was crowded in my shop…

I did the majority of stripping out the old interior before I brought the boat into the shop, and removed the glass and hardware. But there was still some cleaning to do…

 We decided to leave the original deck intact. Just reinforce it where needed and reseal it. I put down new plywood on top of it (3/8” thk.).

Here are the bones…

The really interesting parts, the sub-structure was already covered up when these pictures were taken. It was a lot of fun, everything was built off of a string line from the center of the bow to the center of the transom. I went to some pains to get the boat as level as I possibly could, then did a lot of measuring and used a lot of cardboard making templates. All the parts and pieces were built and assembled, then were all taken apart and I sealed each and every piece with 2 coats of fiberglass resin. All the structural pieces were glassed into the hull to help provide rigidity.

This project took from October until March to complete. I would estimate I put between 150 and 300 hrs. of work into it.

The boat after finishing.

This was an interesting project but not something I would necessarily be interested in doing again.

Roy

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