So all this work so far and we haven’t done a single bit of boat building…. Fortunately now that the shed is done it’s time to start lofting! Lofting is basically the process of taking a bunch of measurements from our plans and transferring them onto a full scale grid to draw the lines of the boat in real size. A few things are required for lofting, but most important is a large flat level floor a few feet longer than the length of your boat, and a few feet wider than the height from keel to sheer. Since we didn’t happen to have a 16×40 flat surface laying around I wen’t about building it

Unfortunately building a boat where we are requires a rather elaborate shelter. The first order of business was designing and building a boat shed that is both cheap and strong, so we overloaded our trusty toyota with lumber and set to work.

Raising the frames, and setting the ridge pole required some imagination with just the two of us

swab didn’t help at all…

The shed is 20ft by 44ft The plastic should work fine for the summer, but we will have to come up with something more substantial come winter. The shed is complete now, but these are the most recent pictures we have so far.

After many months of searching we finally decided on the hull of a 35 ft George Buehler design called Button. We love the salty lines of the Button’s hull, but the deck, cabin, and rig were not right for us. luckily George Buehler is awesome, and is doing a bunch of custom work on the plans so she will be exactly what we want. She will be a 35 ft gaff rigged ketch. Complete with rat lines, baggy wrinkles, and top mast. Wildly impractical, but dreams aren’t alway’s practical so salty she will be! –

This is a sketch I made of the finished product.

Well we finally decided to start a blog and document the process of our yacht building escapades. We are about a month into the build, but we will do some back tracking to start from day one.