Mike Carr builds an Apple Pie dinghy (free plans) and has fun…

I love his evident pleasure when he rows the little boat for the first time!

Download free plans for this handy little boat.

Nick Smith builds a 17ft clinker motor launch

Nick Smith is building a 17ft khaya motor launch for a Swedish customer based in San Francisco, who is having a hundred foot-plus steel sailing yacht built in Rotterdam. Mona Louise is to be one of his davit tenders.

Read about Nick here.

Here’s what Nick says about the project:

‘I am fitting twin lifting eyes on the transom, while the forward purchase is a bronze strut bolted through the keel and apron, and through the foredeck to a bronze shackle eye.
‘I have fitted the very popular and reliable 2YM Yanmar 15 hp twin diesel inboard.
‘Drilling for the stern tube is a job I have done many times but always requires total concentration.
‘The after davit lifting eye arrangement, transfers the weight through the transom to the keel. The area under the after deck has been properly coated, due to the amount of condensation the wood is exposed to.
‘The decks have been fed with a mixture of white spirit and boiled linseed oil; it’s 6mm iroko planking laid on a 6mm marine ply subdeck, glued with epoxy, and payed with a polyurethane rubberoid compound. The khaya mahogany king plank and cover boards are to be to be fully varnished.’

Make your folding bike amphibious, sort-of…

Is this towable folding dinghy the answer to the great question of how to get ashore, and then travel once you are ashore? It could be particularly useful for those of us who use a petrol outboard rather than a diesel – you can’t take a can of petrol with you in a taxi!