Build the New Instant Boats

Provides plans and instructions for building a variety of simple boats out of plywood, and offers advice on useful tools, equipment, and techniques

Harold H. Payson--known to associates, friends, and his wife as Dynamite--thinks you can build a boat. In fact, if you can saw a penciled line, apply glue, drive nails, and bring a modest measure of patience to the task, you can build and launch a smart and able craft in as few as 40 man-hours. You need not be driven by lack of tools, materials, skills, or time to abandon in frustration a project you conceived in a spirit of pleasurable anticipation.

Years ago, when Dynamite began supplementing his boatbuilding work by selling boat plans, he got feedback from a number of customers who found the boats too difficult to build. Many of these would-be boatbuilders had never heard of lofting and were intimidated and discouraged by the necessity of building the boat itself. Many of them, too, could not find local suppliers of the lumber and other materials called for by the plans.

Selling plans for boats that never got built went against Dynamite's Down East grain, and it was also, he figured, "a straight road to bankruptcy in the long run." He outlined the problem to Philip Bolger, of Gloucester, Massachusetts, arguably the most innovative small-craft designer around, and Bolger agreed, on one condition, to design a series of boats that would require no lofting, no jig, and no lumber that could not be obtained at any local building-supplies store. Boats that would not require a great investment of time to cut out and button up. In short, boats for the inexperienced builder whose fundamental desire is to get out on the water. The one condition was that Dynamite would build and thoroughly test a prototype of each design to wring out every bug before offering the plans for sale. Dynamite readily agreed, and a felicitous partnership was born. The eventual result was the original fleet of six boats described in his first book, Instant Boats.

Here are eleven new Instant Boats to choose from, including three built with a new "Tack and Tape" method that eliminates most of the beveling and results in a very shapely and spritely craft. Flip through the pages and compare the odd, sometimes startling shapes of the patterns with the pleasing sheers and functional good looks of the completed boats. You will begin to appreciate the genius of Bolger. In the opening chapters Dynamite tells you with common sense and uncommon good humor everything you need to know to build one of his boats. You can then start right in cutting readily available plywood sheets to precomputed patterns. (You can build directly from the book, but the purchase of larger-scale plans at a modest cost from Dynamite will make the task of scaling off the patterns easier.) Before you know it you will be fastening them together--all your basic assembly virtually behind you, and years on the water just ahead.

Pleasant sailing.