guide to make boat

Robert Christinger is the man behind  Alumar Yachts. His first experience of our designs was when he bought plans for the Dix 43 Pilot, to have one built for himself. He converted our 2-dimensional paper plans into a very detailed 3-dimensional computer model, complete with every piece of metal that was to go into the boat structure.
Then he converted the entire structure into interlocking pieces, nested them onto aluminium plates and had them cut by a metal supplier with CNC equipment. That is the process of creating a kit that can be built by a professional boatbuilder, or any suitably experienced amateur.

The pieces were delivered to the builder and the boat in the photo below was the result.


That was the first of a series. Since then Robert has designed similar CNC kits for a few of our other designs. Alumar Yachts can supply cutting files for a kit to be cut by a supplier near to the builder or can arrange for supply of a pre-cut kit to be delivered. Robert can also customise the model and cutting files to suit the owner's needs.

One of the people for whom Robert supplied cutting files is Brian Russell in Tennessee. Brian is a very skilled metal sculptor who has taken to boatbuilding. He is building the Dix 43 Pilot for himself and producing a high quality boat.


Brian's company is Odyssey Yachts, with a great blog illustrating every step of his building process. Odyssey Yachts is also the agent for Alumar Yachts in North America, able to supply pre-cut kits for our metal designs.

If you are considering building a metal boat, contact Robert or Brian via the contact pages on their websites. They can help to reduce the time and effort needed to build a quality boat.

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

The WOOD Regatta is approaching fast. It will be sailed on 20-22 May at the  Rock Hall Yacht Club in Maryland, just across Chesapeake Bay from Annapolis.

This looks like being a memorable racing and social event. A wide range of wooden boat types have already entered and the Rock Hall Yacht Club has a reputation for laying on excellent racing, with good facilities both on and off the water. Organisation is by Carl Cramer and his able staff at Wooden Boat Magazine.

You can read more about the regatta at http://www.woodenboat.com/woodregatta.php and keep up to date on developments through the WOOD Regatta thread on the Wooden Boat Forum .

Wooden sailboats up to 30ft on deck are eligible, so whether you have an Argie 10 or a Didi 26, you are able to sail in the regatta.  I have entered my Paper Jet #001 and hope to meet owners of some of our other wooden boats there as well.

Don't wait too long, entries close on May 5th.

With my apologies to the late great William Shakespeare, we have just come through a trying time. Those of you who have tried to visit our website and instead found error pages or error messages will have felt some of the frustration along with us.

It started with reports that some visitors from South Africa could not access our website. Try as we might, we could not find for certain where the problem was. It only affected some and not others but we knew there was a problem to sort out. Internet techs and computer geeks on both sides of the Atlantic tried to find the problem without success. My conclusion was that there was a breakdown in connection between a router in Northern Virginia and our ISP, not too far away.

For those who don't know these things (and probably also don't care), your computer talks to websites on the other side of the world with signals that travel at the speed of light and pass through up to 20 routers and the cables, microwaves etc that connect them. Each of those routers can be identified by IP address, owner, location etc so that we can find where a problem is, if we are lucky. So, I identified that my problem was probably with a particular router machine at a particular company in Andover, VA.

However, that bit of info did not solve the problem. Before I was able to arrange a fix, my website disappeared from the face of the earth, to be replaced by 404 Error Page messages where previously we had all those pretty pictures and lots of text to help you fall asleep. Its disappearance also sent 18-24 hours of emails flying off into cyberspace at a speed so fast that even the Hubble Telescope has no chance of spotting them, let alone ugly witches staring into a bubbling pot.

So, if you sent us any emails in the past day or two and have not had a response, please send them again. If you tried to visit us and have been concerned about the error pages, please visit again. We are still at the same address, although that address has magically moved from Virginia to Massachusetts, courtesy of the wonders of the web, some deft fingerwork on my keyboard and much head scratching to get it all to work properly. I have moved it to a company that is able to offer proper support when I need it.

If you see anything that is not working properly, I apologise. I cannot visit every page of my site to check that they are all working as intended but you guys will spot any problems. Please tell me if you see anything that I need to correct.

Thank you all, for staying loyal to us.

Dudley

The Didi 26 has to rate among our most successful designs. I designed it in 1997/8, so it has been around for about 13 years. In that time we have sold plans for 250 boats, so about 20 boats per year. They have been built by amateur builders on all continents and in far-off corners of the world.

I have no idea how many are on the water because only a small proportion of owners send me their launch and sailing photos. I am very grateful to those owners of our boats who do send photos of the build process and sailing once completed.

The most recent sailing photo that I have received for a Didi 26 was from Bill Richards on South Island in New Zealand. He has sent me a few sailing pics over the past year or two but the new one is very nice, showing his "Panic Knot" at speed under masthead asymmetrical in strong winds.

Bill added the following commentary to his photo.

"The conditions where extremely testing with a southerly wind that ranged from 5 knots to 30 knots. So we put up as much sail as we dared and went for it. We did wipe out several times both using the fractional and mast head kites. We tried very hard to break stuff but didn't succeed. max speed was 15 knots in flat water. And everything was under control on a good deep run, unfortunatley the course then called for a reach to the finish so we had to turn and try and carry kite, we managed very well until the gusts built to strong and then couldn't control it, ( the other boats wiped out before us) recovery was quick and I can now prove that the boat has a good righting moment, as we managed to have the mast head kite up and full main up with the top of the mast in the water!

What helped us was that the oppositon were flying conventioanl spinnakers and when they lost it they didn't recover as quickly as us. When we rounded up we didn't ever get as far as head to wind or worse as the oppositon did. The crew didn't even get wet feet as the boat on its side sits very high in the water. There is no chance of any water getting near the companion way.

The photo shows us doing about 12 knots."
 
We also have a 23ft version of this concept, the Didi 23.
 
Please visit our website to see our other designs.

About 9 years ago we turned 50 and had a big party. Now we have turned 80. How did we age so fast, another 30 in less than 10 years?

The answer is that we have now sold our boat designs to customers in 80 countries. That is the power of the internet. It allows us to reach, communicate with and support people in almost any country in the world. We are able to support a builder in a small country on the other side of the world just as easily as a builder around the corner from us.

As long as we are able to communicate by email, the builder can send me questions and I can respond in a reasonably short time. That is easy enough if the builder is fairly comfortable with English but it has sometimes presented challenges when neither of us understands the language of the other. On-line translation services have helped tremendously, allowing me to translate the questions into English, write the answer then translate back into the builder's language before sending the email. The translation sometimes needs a bit of interpretation because of the translation program using general terms rather than boating terms but the message does get through.

When I was a kid, my parents used to talk of Outer Mongolia as a really out-of-the-way place, even more unreachable than Timbuktu. They were right, of course, but the world has changed. Now we have 11 boats, from 15 to 43ft, being built or already in the water, in a city named Irkutsk. This city is on the shores of Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater lake in the world. It is more than 1 mile deep in places, holds 20% of all of the fresh water in the world (as much water as all of the Great Lakes together) and it would take the Amazon River 5 years to fill it. Irkutsk is in the middle of Siberia, Russia, to the North of Mongolia. I find it amazing that we have so many customers in a remote place like that. Their water is frozen almost half the year, so they have a short sailing season. That doesn't stop them from wanting to build boats. Read more about the amazing Lake Baikal.

The boat above is a Didi 26 being built in Irkutsk by Ivan Vasilyev. A bigger sister, the Didi 38, is being built by Stanislav Pechenkin.

We have other boats being built in many other places that are seldom, if ever, heard of. You can see the countries where we have sold plans on our countries page.

It is growing cold here but not as cold as Siberia, I am sure. We have snow flurries in the forecast for tonight and tomorrow will be the day for adding Christmas lights to the outside of the house. Brrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Dudley

Visit our website.

We have developed a strong following among amateur boatbuilders over many years. This did not happen by accident because my own roots are deeply bedded in amateur projects of my own. I built my first boat in 1974, a 4.5m (14' 9") tortured plywood single-handed trapeze catamaran that I raced for a few years. This was also the first design that I drew, as an inexperienced amateur.

That was followed in 1975 by the 11m (36ft) "Tai-Neam" to a van de Stadt design, the 10m (34ft) "Concept Won" to our award winning CW975 design and the 11.5m (38ft) "Black Cat" to our Didi 38 design, prototype for our very successful radius chine plywood building method. There were also a few dinghies and canoes, the last being the prototype of the Paper Jet trapeze skiff design.

But this post is not about my own projects, it is about other amateurs building our boats. They number in the thousands. Most go about building their boats at their own pace, then launch and sail them without ever contacting us again.

The boat above is an Hout Bay 30, built in Germany by Christiane and Jorg Langanky. They built their boat, sent me photos and have now sailed away to cruise the world.

There are also many builders who like to show  their projects, to proudly display what they have achieved. I am thankful to those builders for sending us the info, either photos or links to websites or blogs about their projects.

We have a large section of our website dedicated to amateur projects of all sizes, with photos of boats being built and completed projects. Some of them have links to websites where the owners have taken the trouble to document every step of the build with photos, posting them for others to follow.

Time pressure has prevented me from adding to that section for awhile but technology came to my rescue. Now many builders choose blogs to show their projects. When they send us the link we list them on our Amateur Builders Web Links.

If you are considering building a boat yourself and are concerned about your ability to take on such a build, take a look at the projects. The links are sorted by design to make it easier to find what you want. Most of these pages are in the language of the builder but some browsers can be set to automatically translate them into your own language.

Here are some examples from our list.
Quinn Farnes building his Paper Jet in California.
Sergey Bogdanov building his Argie 15 in Russia.
Roland Zellweger building his Didi 26 on a beach in the Philippines.
Jarl Steffanson building his Hout Bay 33 in Iceland.
Marco Gheri and Alessio Bianchi building their Vickers 45AC in Italy
.
If you are already building one of our boats and you have a blog for the project, please send me the link so that I can add it to the list.

Have a great holiday season.

Dudley Dix