Don’t miss the boat> Book takes vessel builders step by step

BUILDING SMALL BOATS by Greg Rossel, WoodenBoat Publications, Brooklin, 1998, 278 pages, $39.95.

If you think you’d like to build a boat, here’s how. This book, by someone who has built a lot of them and teaches boat building at the WoodenBoat School in Brooklin, is all you need in the way of instruction.

It would have saved me a lot of time and trouble, in fact, if I had had it beside me when I built my first boat a few years ago, a 12 1/2-foot sailing dinghy.

But — there’s always a but — you also need a good space to work, some sense for handling tools, and, above all, a lot of patience. You also need access to a nearby bandsaw, table saw and thickness planer. Greg Rossel tells you what other tools you need and how to sharpen them, how to make some of them yourself, and how to use them safely.

Another but: If you are prejudiced in favor of plastic, read no farther — or else reconsider. Rossel is a persuasive advocate of wood and might convert you. He says a wooden boat can be custom designed and repaired more easily than plastic. He argues that wood looks better than plastic, as admitted by the way plastic-boat builders keep adding teak and mahogany trim.

Properly maintained, a wooden boat can last for many years — far longer than an automobile. He could have added that a wooden boat sounds and handles better than Tupperware when you take it sailing or rowing.

Rossel starts out by telling you how to set up a shop and equip it with the right tools. He continually stresses quality and warns against the discount bargain bins. Used planes may do, but watch out for a warped sole or a cracked or welded casting. You may have to buy a good set of four long-handled chisels, but if you find some in a flea market, you can always repair or replace a damaged handle and grind out any nicks.

You can make some tools that are better than what you can buy. He shows you how to make a planking bevel gauge out of an old hacksaw blade, a caulking wheel out of scrap wood and a fender washer, and various handy marking devices.

You won’t find his “curve-capture” devices in any store. Each is a square of thin plywood. One has four different concave curves, the other convex. When planking a boat, you can find which concave curve fits the frame and then use the matching convex curve to tell how deeply to hollow out the plank at that point. If that sounds confusing, his drawing will make it clear.

Rossel’s instructions are generic, applicable especially to round-bottom types with planks covering bent or sawn ribs. Planking can be either smooth carvel or stepped lap-strake. He often refers to the WoodenBoat School’s Catspaw dinghy, of which he has built a half-dozen, and to the longer Whitehall pulling boat. He ignores newer methods like strip-planking and stressed-plywood construction. He happens to be building a 16-foot sharpie just now in his shop at Troy, in northern Waldo County.

His chapter on “Lofting Demystified” is a masterpiece. Many boat builders skip this old-fashioned first step, which means making a full-size drawing of the entire boat with all its parts, viewed from the side, from the top, and end-on. By laying out all the dimensions on painted plywood, you will be checking the plans for any errors, using flexible battens to draw fair curves, and learning every detail about the boat you are about to build.

Step by step, he takes you through the actual construction. First comes the backbone, the assembly of the curved stem, the keel and the transom. Then the molds are made and installed. They are a series of temporary vertical cross-sections, spaced from stem to transom. Together, they form the shape of the hull. Then come the ribbands, also temporary.

These fore-and-aft strips fill out the hull shape.

Now it is time to steam and install the frames or ribs, usually oak strips that are clamped to the insides of the ribbands if you are building rightside-up, or bent over the outside of the ribbands if upside-down.

Rossel tells you how to make a steam box from wood or else plastic sewer pipe and how to rig a boiler from perhaps an aluminum beer keg and a length of automobile heater hose.

Don’t allow a dip in the hose, or condensation will collect there and block the flow of steam. And forget about caulking the steam box. You want steam to escape so that hot steam can continue to enter. The trick is to heat each rib rapidly for the right amount of time and then quickly bend and clamp it in place. “Think lobsters here, not roast pork,” Rossel advises.

In the same careful way, pointing out tricks and shortcuts and always warning about safety hazards, he walks you through the next stages. “Lining off” means laying out the shapes of the planks on the edges of the molds. Then each pair of planks, one for each side, are cut to size. This painstaking process involves transferring points from the boat to planking stock, using a batten to connect the points in a fair curve, cutting with a bandsaw just outside of the line, and finally planing to the line.

Hanging each plank involves beveling and hollowing it to fit properly and often applying boiling water to make it settle into a curved place. Once the boat is planked, the interior fittings, such a handsome breasthook at the bow carefully fitted thwarts and nicely beveled oarlock pads, help give the boat grace and character.

Rossel takes on these tasks one at a time. He pays special attention to knees, the curved brackets that support the thwarts and strengthen the quarters, where the side meets the transom. He likes especially knees that are cut from the roots of the hackmatack tree, so that they have a natural curve. He gets hackmatack knees from a man in St. Albans, Maine. I could have used that information when I was building my dinghy. I spent a year hunting down Maine woodsmen, but none was interested. I finally found a source in Nova Scotia and took the old Bluenose to pick them up.

Of course there are other ways to do knees, such as steam-bending and laminating. In one of his niftiest comments, Rssel says that the laminated knee offers the best of all worlds. “It is rugged, defect free, and good looking — at least if one can suppress the urge to use garishly contrasting woods.”

There you have in a nutshell his sense of what makes a classy boat. His book can be a wonderful guide if you are willing to devote a year or two and take it one step at a time.

Richard Dudman, former Washington bureau chief for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, lives in Ellsworth and sails a wooden Friendship sloop.