Customer Reviews

Building Small Boats

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It is well written and illustrated. It is 8 1/2" by 11" about 280 pages, hardback, and published by WoodenBoat Publications. Apparently, the author was a teacher at the Wooden Boat School.

It covers everything from tools, wood selection, joinery and finishing. Best of all it had an in depth section on lofting that even me, a former Marine could understand. It is the only book that I have read that introduces lofting to a boat building novice and lifts the shroud of mystery around it.

If you plan to build a wooden boat for the first time, this book is just what you need. When I embarked on my first boatbuilding project armed with my hobbyist's furniture building skills and a set of boat plans, I nearly gave up in frusteration. After reading this book, everything makes so much more sense. He explains the terminology, the woods, the tools, the glues, and all the little pitfalls you will encounter along the way. My boat is now well underway and it would probably still be couple sheets of paper nailed to the wall of my garage if it weren't for "Building Small Boats."

This book should be called "Building Small Wooden Boats." The author sticks to traditional methods and materials and he's very good at explaining these. It's much more accessible than general boatbuilding manuals such as Steward and Chapelle, but more in depth than the usual how-to book. The drawings are very helpful and the text is clear, concise and well organized (though for some reason there's no index). There are some subjects I would have liked to see discussed in more detail, but overall a great boatbuilding book.

A real practical guide in traditional wooden boat building. If you're fascinated with wooden boats and actually want to build one (or more), this is the equivalent of having an excellent teacher right there. The easy-going style and clear descriptions, with ample pictures and diagrams, means you have a very good chance of producing a fine vessel that you will be proud of. If I were re-starting by boat building book collection, this would be my first book

This book has everything a person needs to build a small wooden boat from plans or kit. After building several small boats, and consulting other boatbuilding books, I always come back to this book for answers and techniques. Finally, I think Mr Rossel does the best job at explaining the process of spiling to obtain plank shape. Great book!

This is, quite simply, the most useable and useful book for small boat building which is out there. A legendary teacher at the WoodenBoat School, Greg Rossel uses his years of experience to take the reader through the whole process of constructing a wooden boat. The chapter on lofting alone is worth the price of the whole book. One might consider Chapelle's "Boatbuilding" to be Old Testament: accurate, certainly, but with many references which today the reader would find archaic. Rossel, however, is decidedly New Testament. He is a cheerful, witty, and knowlegeable companion who takes you from selecting a set of plans to finishing the brightwork. Highly recommended.

Gordon H.Hafner

I loved the clear way the author explains the process of building wooden boats. His pictures were fantastic. His sailboat is beautiful. The only thing that threw me at first was the chapter on lofting, (drawing out the boat parts full scale on paper from grid measurements). I suggested to the author that he revise that chapter a little for novices like me, he may not need to do so. A reader might read one of the other authors' chapter on lofting to further understand the process, which I did.

Covers it all with wit and wisdom. You will probably want other books as well, but this one is the best I have seen, with enough detail and breadth to take the mystery out of many of the processes required to build a boat.

I have never bothered to review a book on Amazon before, but this book has compelled me to do so. The description of the lofting process is a masterpiece. I took every book on boatbuilding out of the library and this book is the only one that could adequately describe this confusing and complicated process. I'm an inexperienced boatbuilder and I'm building a pretty complicated John Gardner boat, from "Building Classic Small Craft." There are no full plans, just the dimensions in the offset table. If not for this book, it all would have remained hopelessly confusing.

I had the pleasure of taking Greg Rossel's "Lofting" class at the WoodenBoat School in Maine some years ago. Lofting is the very exacting process of taking a numeric description of a specific hull shape and converting that information to actual construction diagrams, from which you can build that hull. If you just want a quick-built boat, skip learning lofting. But if you want to understand the process that master wooden boat and ship builders went through hundreds of years ago (for example, as upstairs in the huge "lofts" of Dutch sailing ship building yard sheds) and still go through even today, then you do want to learn to loft. Either way, with or without lofting, "Building Small Boats" is absolute required reading for any small boat builder, novice or experienced. Greg is recognized as being one of the leading small wooden boat builders/instructors on the planet today. He combines an amazing mind, with precise exactness, with extremely simple to follow instructions, with the best possible hand-drawn (no less!) diagrams, with an uproarious sense of humor! Want to learn the secrets of the master small boat builder, all the way from thinking about a boat to putting it on the water? Take "Lofting" and "Fundamentals" at the WoodenBoat School from Greg. Second best? Read Greg's "Building Small Boats"...and then read it again....and once again....until the pages are worn and "dog eared", as Greg would insist, giving you his knowing wink, with that big infectious smile on his bearded face!