This Blog will show my effort, as an amateur builder, to fulfill a dream: To build and launch my own boat and then sail it arround the Agean archipellago, or one day, who knows, across an ocean! I will try to send posts showing the progress of my work so that friends can share my enthousiasm and other potential amateur boatbuilders can learn from my mistakes.
It all started about a year ago when I red an article about James Wharram. I, by that time, had already decided to build a boat and was doing some recearch on the internet, trying to choose a design. I was so focused on monohulls that the idea of building a catamaran had never crossed my mind. That article revealed a whole new world to me! Wharram cats are easy and economical to build but, most important, they represent a philosophy on the approach of sailing life and the sea in general, based on simplicity and self-sufficiency. Morover, the abillity to build one hull at a time and assemble the finished boat on a beach solved a lot of my problems concerning my available building space, which was on...the mountain! That was it! I chose to build a Tiki 31. I liked the scooner rig and it was the larger of the Tiki designs that I could afford building, without having the bureaucratic problems concerning boats larger than 10m in Greece.
The set of plans I ordered arrived in September. By the end of October a pile of 8mm plywood was laying in the garage I am using as a building place, waiting for me to start "lofting" thus drawing the lines of all the parts full size.
I am using Birch plywood B/B, WBP, glued with exterior grade glue. Birch is not durable when in contact with water but because the boat will be seathed and coated in epoxy I don't think there is a problem. On the other hand Birch plywood has a realy smooth face which I believe makes it ideal for a painted finish on the inside of the boat. My first mistake was that I didn't buy all the plywood required on the first place and now my supplier has run out of it. As a result, I have to wait for a couple of months before I can buy the rest of the same quallity plywood needed. Fortunatelly I have a lot to do until then
As soon as I finished drawing all the bulkheads and the parts for the hullsides full size I started cutting them with a jigsaw.
Enjoying boatbuilding!
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