Customer Reviews

Boats to Go: 24 Easy-To-Build Boats That Go Fast With Low Power

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Thomas Firth Jones is a modern practitioner of old-fashioned boat design. His section on "long, narrow powerboats" explains how non-planing boats used to (and still can) go through the water at reasonable speed and with marvelous gas mileage.
The first section on small kayak-style canoes includes some simple math to show how he took the weight of the boater and designed a small, hard-chined canoe with that much displacement. One of the best explanations I've seen.
An experienced builder could probably craft one of the kayaks from the drawings in the book, but I've built two boats and I would pay for the full-size plans before I put saw to wood.
Having said that, the sketches of the boats illustrate the considerations a boat-builder (or boat-buyer) should think about when picking one's dream boat. If a boat is a hole in the water, surrounded by wood, into which one pours money, then this book is a great consumer guide about choosing which hole to jump into.
See also "New Plywood Boats" by the same author, which has some further critiques of some of the kayak designs in this book. If you are interested in boatbuilding, you should buy one of these two books.

An extremely well written book, you will learn a great deal about boat design and construction. Enjoyable reading, the author is a very good writer, concise, pithy, and interesting. He could probably make the phone book a good read.

A reasonable book with good text and drawings, the only downside was the Author has very strong opinions regarding his subject, for example in such areas as wood choice etc. This rather jars when reading. The only other issue is the Author has tended to use some stronly American phraseology which for a non U.S. reader requires a consideerable amount of searching the text for a meaning.