Category: Techniques

Jamie Poynton and friends build a stitch-and-glue runabout

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Jamie Poynton and friends built this 14ft vee-bottomed stitch and glue
marine ply and epoxy runabout at the Boat Building Academy

Boat Building Academy principal Yvonne Green has sent us still more great photos from the Academy’s  student launch day in December, this time of a stitch and glue runabout built by Jamie Poynton and friends. Thanks again Yvonne!

Jamie lives in Axmouth, near Lyme Regis and for a while commuted weekly to Eel Pie Island in London to work with his grandad, who was renovating a 1950s tug.

City & Guilds awarded him a full bursary to enable him to join the course at the Boat Building Academy.  With help from fellow students Seb Evans and guitar maker Rob Murphy, Jamie built a  14ft vee-bottomed stitch and glue outboard runabout in marine ply, based on a V-shaped ski boat.

Yvonne calls this the Chanel boat because of it’s clean, simple look, posh laid mahogany deck and beautifully finished black and white paintwork, black carpet and white leatherette seating, and adds that the photo at the top (Jamie in the back, Rob and Seb in the front) sums up the atmosphere in their particular part of the workshop during the course.  ‘It was fantastic seeing them thrilled by their own achievement and looking cool on launch day’, she says.

The form of the boat was created by Academy instructor Mike Broome, who also designed Bob Hinks’s boat Cirrus. Jamie wanted to build a ski boat, so Mike produced a lines drawing (14ft  loa, 5ft 4in beam, 22 degrees deadrise, 12ft lwl). The bow was a conical development and the panel shapes were generated by first building a panel half model at 2in:1ft from modelling ply. The finished design in terms of deck layout and interior evolved as the boat was built.

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PS Don’t forget to ask for a pdf copy of the Academy’s prospectus for the coming year, as it makes interesting reading. Email Yvonne at office@boatbuildingacademy.com and I’m sure she’ll send you a copy.

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Ella, a 12ft stitch-and-glue skiff

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Preliminary drawings for the Ella skiff

I’ve decided to develop plans for a little 12ft stitch and glue skiff using Greg Carlson’s excellent Chine Hull Developer plywood hull development tool (scroll to near the bottom of this page).

This small project will take a little while to complete, and follows my 15ft 6in stitch and glue Julie skiff, which has attracted a lot of interest. However, boats like the the Julie can easily be a bit too much of a project for many people: they’re too long to be built easily in the average garage (in the UK at least), and they’re marginal when it comes to car-topping.

So these preliminary drawings show the very beginnings of the 12ft small skiff, which I’ve chosen to name after my daughter Ella. It will bear some similarities and of course quite a few differences compared with the larger boat, not least because the lines of a short boat like this must be rather fuller than those of the larger model and can’t benefit from the same hull form features aimed at reducing drag due to the formation of eddies.

However, like the Julie skiff, it has been conceived with rowing, not outboarding or sailing primarily in mind. For those who take an interest in figures, ratios and the rest, the wetted area here is 31sqft, maximum beam at the gunwales is 4ft, the design displacement is 400lbs, the righting moment is 254ft-lbs at 15 degrees of heel, and the prismatic coefficient is about .57.

Anyway, I’d be delighted to hear from people interested in the project – you can reach me at gmatkin@gmail.com.

PS I made a train journey this pm and took the opportunity to make a bit more progress. I’ve made up a lines drawing, and sketched some internal joinery, including what will be a removable centre thwart to allow the rower to row from a forward position when there’s something or someone heavy in the stern.

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Nick Gates & Co, of Thornham Marina

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From top: Lady May;  SCODs ; and Girouette

Nick Gates & Co is a traditional workshop based at Thornham Marina, near Emsworth in Hampshire.

Set up in 1999 by boatbuilder Nick Gates, the company specialises in the repair and restoration of wooden boats and looks after a wide range of craft, from clinker dinghies, to classic racing yachts, steam launches and gentleman’s motor yachts.

Nick trained at the International Boatbuilding Training College in Lowestoft before joining the renowned Combes Boatyard in Bosham, where he worked until the yard closed in 1999.

Boats being worked on in the yard at the moment include Lady May, a 1930s Camper & Nicholson launch, which came to the yard for finishing and to have its interior put back in, and Girouette, a Hillyard-built boat that has been in the same family for nearly 50 years.

Partially restored by Combes in the early 1990s, she has since been laid up, and is now at Nick Gates & Co for a new deck, interior and engine.

Nick also specialises in the Nicholson-designed, 26ft South Coast One-Design (SCOD), and in recent years five of the local fleet have visited the workshop. The jobs carried out on these boats have included a total rebuild, new decks and coachroof, external varnishwork and mast repairs.

For more information see the company’s very nice website at http://www.nickgates.co.uk

This page from the site might be particularly interesting to anyone who has been interested in the progress of Gadfly II – note the strong resemblance.