Proas through the ages
My buddy Lee picked up this ancient artifact for me recently: How to Build 20 BOATS, a Fawcett 50 cent publication from 1943. It’s reprinted material from Mechanix Illustrated, and it happens to include the PLYWOOD PROA by Hi Sibley. Aside from the historical value (nearly equivalent to King Tut’s Tomb) I find it interesting that:
1. In all the years since then, plywood is still the preferred construction material for amateur boat…
Equilibre
A French West Indies Proa
Jeremy Fischer designed, built and sails his 40’ proa Equilibre out of Martinique. Everything about this boat is virtually perfect: the strong Micronesian heritage, the huge crab claw sail, the time and cost sensitive construction/fit-out, even the color (probably the result of the can being on clearance at the local chandlery). Equilibre helps me think about balance, not only with wind and tide, but with the…
Bamboo Boatbuilding
Bamboo is a material with excellent engineering qualities that has so far been useful to boatbuilders mainly as a source for spars. In this article, Richard Emmet proposes processing bamboo for marine plywood.
I held a sample of interior grade bamboo ply in my hand and it took less than two seconds to decide that I could build boats out of this stuff. I could not believe how light it was! And it felt about as stiff as steel. Of course…
SOF Outrigger Canoe
Brian Schulz of Cape Falcon Kayak in Oregon has been sailing Fog and Thunder, his skin-on-frame version of a Hawaiian outrigger sailing canoe. “Adapting the hawaiian outrigger sailing canoe for skin on frame construction has been a powerful and revelatory experionce for me… at 20 feet long and less than 150 lbs fully rigged it has renewed my faith in the endless adaptability if skin on frame technology. Building it mostly from scraps I…
