guide to make boat

The time is fast approaching to prepare our 2nd annual calendar. Once again, it will feature photos of boats of our design. I have received a few suitable photos during the past few months but still have a long way to go to fill the 12 pages plus cover.



So, if you have one of our boats and have some really nice photos of your boat in a great setting, or some nice action photos, please send them along to me by email for consideration. We will not be paying for use of the photos but your boat will be featured in a calendar that you will be able to buy for yourself or for gifts, to show off your pride and joy. Captions on the photos will include info on the boat and owner.

Interesting build photos will also be considered. If you have a photo of your project that has something very aesthetic or appealing about it, that might also make it into the calendar.



Photos must be clear and of high resolution to be suitable. Preferably in colour but sometimes a good black and white photo looks even better than colour.

Please scour your hard drive, cameras and memory cards to find the best images that you can offer. I look forward to selecting the best for the 2013 calendar. Browse our 2012 calendar on the publisher's website. The 2013 version will probably have a similar format.

Regards to all and happy sailing.

Dudley Dix

Most of our plywood boats are well suited to being built from kits and many boats have been built this way to our designs for years. Kits are available from suppliers in countries worldwide. See further down this post for a list of countries and the companies to contact.

We have recently changed our strategy for cutting kits in USA, for reasons that are beyond the scope of this blog. This has involved a change of company to cut the kits, resulting in a change in the way that they are sold.

The company that we have selected to cut our kits in future for USA is Chesapeake Light Craft, also known as CLC. This company has been cutting plywood kits for many years and is well experienced at cutting, packaging and shipping plywood kits, boatbuilding materials and accessories. They have shipped in excess of 20,000 kits to date, which must rank them among the top plywood kit companies worldwide.


CLC market their own kits and don't want to confuse the issue by marketing our kits among theirs. This means that we must market them ourselves and CLC will concentrate on the cutting and shipping. So, from here on, Dudley Dix Yacht Design will be the ones to speak to if you are in USA and want to ask questions about a kit for one of our plywood designs. We will answer your questions, sell plans and take your kit order and payment and provide all backup during construction to our normal level, as shown in our backup policy. We will pass on your order details to Chesapeake Light Craft and they will cut the kit, package and ship to your location. If you have any problems with damage in shipping or other issues, send them to us and we will arrange the remedy with CLC.

Please note that CLC will not sell you a kit for our designs, they will only cut on orders from us. Your order for one of our kits must be placed with us, not CLC.

Chesapeake Light Craft cut their kits from Joubert okoume marine plywood, so you are assured of a high quality kit as a good base from which to start building your new boat project. Starting with a kit will save you the time-consuming step of drawing out your components and cutting them from the plywood sheets. The time saving will vary between designs but you can expect it to be in the range of 10-20% of total building time, depending on the complexity of the boat.

At the moment we only have a few smaller designs shown for supply from CLC but this will increase to the full range as time permits or enquiries dictate. Also, CLC intends to expand their services to include epoxies, glass and solid timbers to those who want them and hope to also offer hardware kits.


You can choose to buy a kit from any of the following suppliers, wherever you are in the world. None of them has sole rights to any country but it is likely that the supplier closest to you will be able to supply to you at the lowest price. Be sure to ask what is included in the kit that is being quoted because this may vary between suppliers.

Australia - Cape Boatworks
France - Pidgikit
Germany - Metz Boats
Italy - Nautikit
Norway - MBoats International
Russia - Chava & Boat Kits Russia
South Africa - CKD Boats
Turkey - Ertug
UK - Exocetus Yacht Kits & Jordan Boats
USA - Dudley Dix Yacht Design

Go to the Dudley Dix Yacht Design website to see the full range of our designs for all materials.

There is a tremendous amount of work involved in preparing CNC cutting files for a big boat. When the boat is a catamaran, that preparatory work increases due to the two hulls and bridgedeck structures. A few people have asked about CNC kits for the DH550 catamaran. I have done panel files for the bulkheads but not for the remainder of the boat. That allows bulkheads to be cut by our normal plywood kit suppliers in various countries around the world. You can see the list of plywood kit suppliers on our kits page. For all other panels of the big cat the builder must develop the correct panel shapes by the normal boatbuilding methods then cut them from sheets of plywood.


The Exocetus kits use stepped scarph joints to join the parts of each panel, with the joints laid out to a saw-tooth pattern to add strength. This joint pattern can be seen in the photo above. People who build her as a one-off without a kit would do a conventional straight sloping scarph instead of this stepped sawtooth scarph.

Exocetus is keeping a complete photographic record of their build project on-line, which gives an excellent resource for builders to use for reference, as well as for potential builders to see what is involved in building one of these boats. The photo diaries can be accessed at the Dix 47 Catamaran Project .

They are developing various kits for the Dix 470, so that a builder can buy what is needed for the next stage of his construction or to suit his needs.

For information on this and our other designs and kits, please visit http://dixdesign.com.

Trailer-sailers are great boats for those who don't want a bigger boat or don't have the funds needed to own a bigger boat and keep it on a permanent mooring or marina. They can be taken home or to a storage facility when not being used, to reduce ownership cost. Their size allows them to be used as a short-term cruiser for a small family, for weekend or holiday cruises of a week or two. They are also capable of getting you into all sorts of nooks and beautiful little spots that are inaccessible to larger boats. This can be great to get away from the crowds in some locations or for just getting you right up to the beach, to almost step ashore onto dry sand.


Launch and retrieval, with their associated activities of preparing the boat and raising or lowering the mast, are relatively simple when there are enough hands to help with doing the actual muscle work and ensuring that rigging wires, halliards etc are not hooking around the trailer, rudder or other obstacles. It is when this is all being done by one person that it can become rather challenging and it becomes very necessary to have your boat well prepared for the operation.

There are various ways to do this with hinged mast steps or tabernacles in combination with spinnaker poles, folding bowsprits and bipods, with varying degrees of effectiveness. The biggest problem is normally ensuring that there is decent lateral support for the mast as it goes up, to stop it from going off centreline and damaging something.

The bigger the boat and the taller the rig, the more important it becomes to have a well thought-out system to raise and lower the mast without a host of people to help. Another factor is how far out of alignment the mast hinge position is from the chainplates. The Cape Cutter 19s shown above have a short mast, folding bowsprit and tabernacle on a flush deck, so it is fairly easy as long as the many ropes and wires don't hook on anything. The Didi 26 shown below has a hinged mast step (less stable than a tabernacle) and taller mast stepped on top of a high cabin, so it will not be easy to do it by yourself without a decent system.


A few days ago I read an article about a system that seems to have sorted out all of the normal problems. The best solutions are normally developed out of necessity, which is the case here. The owner of the boat has a mooring that is up-stream from a low bridge, which means raising his mast after passing under the bridge every time he wants to sail and lowering it before the bridge when returning to moorings.

My thanks the staff at  Tropical Boating for taking the trouble to write a clearly illustrated article about a solo mast raising/lowering system that can be adapted to most trailer-sailers.

See out full range of designs at http://dixdesign.com/ .

A few months ago I blogged a Sneak Preview of a new design that was developing in North Carolina. That boat will not be ready for the Wooden Boat Show in Mystic Seaport later this month as expected but it is progressing. It should be there next year.

Yesterday I received the latest photos from the owner builder, taken this past weekend. When you look at them, please bear in mind that this man is an amateur boatbuilder and this is his first ever boatbuilding project. He has been a very hesitant builder, unsure of his own woodworking skills being up to the task that he had taken on. He has occasionally needed my reassurance to guide him in the right direction or confirmation that he is doing something correctly. He has shown himself to be a meticulous craftsman, working to a higher degree of accuracy than I have in any of my boatbuilding projects.

He has chosen to stain the colour onto the plywood and to use clear finishes. His aim was to allow the grain to show through, highlighting the fact that it is a wooden boat as well as the details of the construction, to anyone who looks at the boat. This could have backfired badly for a careless worker because any mess-ups would be highlighted or accentuated. This level of work takes time, of course, so his progress has been slow.



As you can see, his boat is looking absolutely gorgeous. He is producing a boat that is a work of art and of which he will feel very proud, justifiably so. I look forward to sailing this boat and seeing it exhibited at Mystic in 2013.

The builder is Aussie Hunter Gall. He lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia but is building his boat at a friend's property in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.

You will not find this design on my website yet but it should be there soon. The tentative design name is the DS15, for Didi Sportboat 15. It is 4.5m (14' 9") long and 1.8m (5' 11") beam.

You can see our other designs at http://dixdesign.com/

The files for cutting kits for the Didi 29 Retro have been completed and delivered to CKD Boats in Cape Town. They will be adapted to the CNC Machinery that will be used to cut the kit and cutting of the first boat will start in the next few weeks. The owner will start construction in the next couple of months.

I will keep you updated on construction progress through this blog. In the meantime, here is animated video of the Rhino model of the design.



See more about the Didi 29 Retro in my previous blog entry or at http://dixdesign.com/

We have a new design that is a little out of the ordinary, named the Didi 29 Retro. It is a development of the Didi 26, which is one of our most popular designs with more than 250 plan sets sold. It has the same basic hull, keel options and interior arrangements but that is where the similarity ends. I think that, with the two boats lying next to each other on a marina, few people would realise that they are blood sisters.


This boat is intended for classic sailboat racing, so it needed a classic appearance. To this end we have:-

1) Extended the aft end into a counter stern. This will weigh a bit more but it extends the sailing length, for higher speed potential in stronger conditions.

2) Cropped the forward end to form a plumb bow.

3) Added bulwarks, both because it is a classic feature and to add spring to the sheer. The bulwarks are 100mm high in the bow and taper to a normal toerail height aft of the cabin, so that crew can sit comfortably on the rail.

4) Changed the cabin shape to a more traditional profile with almost vertical sides and compound curved roof.


5) Replaced the modern fractional rig with a big gaff cutter rig. It has carbon spars to reduce rig weight and increase stability. It is very versatile, allowing a wide selection of sail options, to really pile on sail area in the light stuff and reef it right down to a compact fully inboard gaff sloop rig in strong winds, and many variations between. The bowsprit pivots around the bow and retracts to stow on the sidedeck. The Genoa, Yankee and asymmetrical spinnaker are tacked to the bowsprit, so they can be pivoted up to windward for deeper sailing angles instead of being stuck on centreline.


These changes have morphed a very fast modern little racer/cruiser into a traditional racer/cruiser that will be capable of even higher speeds than the original design. It should be extremely quick in light winds and downwind in stronger conditions. The rig is a direct development of the rigs used on the Cape Cutter 19 and Cape Henry 21. Both are surprisingly quick little cruisers in the light to moderate breezes because of their large sail plans, yet are very capable in stronger conditions as well. However, they don't have planing underbodies and the Didi 29 Retro has inherited the planing underbody of the Didi 26, so should go like a witch downwind.

The standard keel options are lifting or fixed bulb keels. The rudder is a cassette that drops through the cockpit floor and locks in place for sailing but can be lifted out for trailing or access to shallow moorings.

The first boat will be built in Hout Bay, South Africa, by the owner. He will use a pre-cut kit of all plywood components, which will be supplied by CKD Boats . Builders will have the choice of building from plans only, plans with full-size Mylar bulkhead patterns or plans with a plywood kit.

For information on our other designs, please visit http://dixdesign.com/ .