This week was the first of our boatbuilding course proper, having completed our extended joinery course before the late May Bank Holiday. Yet it is hard to let go of our benches in Joinery 1. We feel safe there, after 13 weeks developing hand woodworking skills that were a mystery and a distant goal when we started.

So, with an Instructor off sick, and the remaining instructors trying to juggle all the balls, we spent Monday and Tuesday morning – and other spare moments through the week – at our joinery room benches. Each of us had small projects that kept ourselves gainfully occupied. Two of us made ourselves some ‘winding sticks.’ They can be bought on eBay for £60 – an inordinate price for two straight sticks with some simple inlay!

I was so pleased with them, that I just had to mount them in my toolbox’s lid. So here’s a picture of my ‘finished’ tool chest (parenthesis added because there’s always room for some adjustment or tarting up!).

I have also started making a wooden Dorade box. More joinery, really, but a link with big boat boatbuilding – after all, they were designed for the famous 52 foot racing yacht, Dorade, which was launched in 1930, at a cost of $28,000. A tapered dovetail joint is used for the baffle, which is a new type of dovetail joint for us, so it’s a worthwhile project for that reason alone – even if I do end up using it as yet another box!

We had a lecture on lofting basics on Monday, and on Tuesday afternoon we were let loose on the loft floor – well a few sheets of 8×4 foot plywood, painted white, which we screwed down to the wooden boards below.

We are lofting a 10 foot dinghy using an enlarged set of line drawings from a book. The measurements are laid out in a table of offsets. “There are a few errors in the figures” said Bob, our instructor. Oh, great!

Using a (blue) chalk line, we set out the base line and centre lines for the sheer plan (side view) and the Half Beam Plan (bird’s eye view). Old school geometry came in here for ‘erecting a perpendicular’ from these chalk lines and then drawing out a grid. Using the table of offsets, we plotted out the Base Plan, checking that the lines created are ‘fair.’ No straight lines here, it’s all about fair lines i.e smooth curves that look “right.”

After just three and a half days, we have lofted the boat, all bar plotting a new transom – “just to make it more fun” said Bob. More geometry and brain gymnastics here. It is certainly a steep learning curve, thinking in two dimensions, then three dimensions, and then looking at four planes of perspective. But great fun too – we are so pleased that, unlike the last group who did this as a desk top exercise, we are doing this for real.

The next step (and blog installment) is taking patterns and moulds for frames and components directly from the full-size drawings we have created … this is real boat building!