Free boat plans online – Page 21

Traditional steel Dutch dinghy and Forest & Stream skiff compared

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Dutch dinghy and steel-built Forest & Stream skiff

Over in Holland, Hans-Christian Rieck has taken these photos of a traditional steel-built Dutch dinghy of a type often used as tenders to steel-built barges and other craft. They’re strikingly curvaceous little boats, given that they’re made from plates of sheet steel, particularly when compared with the steel-built Forest & Stream skiff seen in the background.

The F&S skiff is being smoothed with filler prior to being painted and having its woodwork fitted. I will be fascinated to hear how this boat works – and I trust it does work well in steel, as it will presumably have a theoretical life time of 80 years or more. I’m pretty sure it will be fine, by the way – it’s clearly greatly scaled up from the 12ft ply dink I drew some ten years ago no, and that will no doubt compensate for the extra weight of the hull. I’d like to take a trip to see it once she’s in the water if that’s ok please Hans-Christian!

Hans-Christian’s workshop trains youngsters in the metalworking skills, and the steel dinghy belongs to the Graf Ship Association – it is destined to be cleaned and refinished.

Here are some earlier images of the F&S skiff, and of a ship, the Jantje ready to be transported to Nordhorn after being sandblasted and sprayed.

Ben Crawshaw finds rowing a little tiring

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Those of you with a cruel streak will laugh this video of Ben Crawshaw’s, while others, like me, will squirm uncomfortably in sympathy at his predicament out at sea with no wind.

He has rowed some surprisingly big distances in his little Onawind Blue. Read all about Ben’s trip from mainland spain to Ibiza and the Columbrete Islands at his weblog The Invisible Workshop.

One thing this film does show is that while rowing is a good thing in principle, it is possible to have too much of it!

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A cool Sketchup model of my Bluestone schooner design

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ArqDirk’s model of my Bluestone schooner. As usual, clicking on the thumbnail will produce a larger image

I didn’t know whether to laugh out loud or shout in anger a couple of evenings ago. I switched on an arts programme on Radio 4 and heard a preposterous ‘artist’ explain that she’d visited somewhere and seen a large rock that didn’t belong to the local area. She learned, apparently, that it had been brought from somewhere else and deposited on the spot where she saw it by a glacier or an ice sheet, and was therefore what’s officially known as an erratic – though when I was a kid in North Lincolnshire, I remember that we called them ‘bluestones’.

So she’d seen an erratic and liked it. So far so good. But then I became positively emotional when she went on to explain how she had become ‘excited’ by the idea of rocks being deposited in places where they didn’t belong and said that with the ‘help’ of a well known arts funding body she had now moved as many as three rocks to new sites from their original homes. What a funny old world. Oh how we laughed! I hope the rocks are equally excited about their new homes.

Thinking about this incident has reminded me that someone I know only as ArqDirk deserves some credit for creating a remarkable Sketchup model of my Bluestone schooner design, which, as you may have guessed, I named some years ago after the bluestones of North Lincolnshire because it combined elements I found in both the old Humber dusters and the North American Hampton boat, which seemed to me to be almost an erratic of its own. Perhaps someone will give Arq a grant one day – creating this model will have taken a considerable amount of effort and thought. I’d give him one myself, but I’m considering a new career moving rocks and may be too busy…

The design won a Duckworks Magazine competition back in 2000, by the way.

Click here to download ArqDirk’s model, which you will be able to manipulate and view from various angles once you have imported it into Sketchup .

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