art meets function

I had 2 pieces of 4mm marine ply sitting in my garage for years. leftovers from doing up an 83yo gaff cutter. Id previously built a row boat from 2 pieces of ply based on a portugese rowing boat. I think you can still get the plans online, its a fun little boat. Anyway I decided to make some mods from the design & ended up with Franken-dingy. That was my nickname for the thing. it was a combo of boxy & curves, had a shitty centre of gravity & was a bastard to row. Other than that it was a pretty good first effort. More than that, it was fun to build & fun to mess about in. Back to the ply. In my wanderings of the web i came across the sport of coastal rowing where insane people would row out to sea in very little craft. Sounded like my kind of fun. looked at buying one but they were expensive & plastic - bad combo.

Then I had a brain wave.

Build a coastal rowing skiff

It had to have certain constraints:

I could only use 2 pieces of 4mm ply because that's all I had

It had to have curves instead of sharp edges BUT you can only bend ply in one axis at a time... pretty tricky to get nice curves

It had to be beautiful

It had to actually work

To the drawing board I went

I hit the sketch book with curves & all sorts of funky things

These are drawn retrospectively as the originals were on bits of paper which have been chucked. But you get the idea.

I'd recently been to Vietnam & seen the locals build circular sculling boats out of split bamboo & sticky tar+ bamboo dust

pretty amazing Like the Scottish corracle , Curracle? little round sculling boat.

Why not build something like that out of ply?

Gotta go

back soon