Two book reviews

I finished reading a few books recently and thought I would post some reccomendations

Building Small Boats by Greg Rossel is a real gospel for small boat building. I was about halfway through it when I took the class at the Watercraft Center back in September. Every technique that we covered in the class was also explained in the book. The chapter on lofting alone is worth the cover price.

Lofting is one of those concepts where you have to hear the procedure several times before it finally sinks in. I finished that chapter before the class and thought maybe I had it, but then doing it with someone who knew how really drove it home.

The chapters on planking, decking, topside finishing, and spiling were great too. Really I found the chapter on tools to be a bit plain, but that's just because I've already got a full load of tools. There's no special boatbuilding equipment that you don't make yourself. If you're looking for a bible of wooden boatbuilding, Greg Rossel wrote it.

John Atkin and his father are both very prolific boat designers. There are a few chapters first about the merit of design and some concepts that are really interesting. But the main meat of this book is boat plans, about 40 of them. The book is printed small, physically, but the plans are complete enough to allow you to choose one if you wanted to build it.

They are supposed to be complete plans in the book. Really, I doubt you could build or even loft directly from what is printed here. Some plans have more information than others, but a table of offsets is a rare sight. I read this book when I was looking for plans to build and chose not to build any of these. But as a guy who likes to read over boat plans & designs, it was pretty fascinating.

There are all kinds of boats in here, sailboats, powerboats, rowboats, you name it. It's a fun read if you like reading about different types and qualities of boats. This is not a catalog of plans, there are actual plans in there. You'd need a magnifying glass to get some of the specifics. If I picked one of these boats I would seek out a higher quality printout of the plans with more details.