A Few Good Reads

I'm making slow but steady progress fairing the boat frame. I'll have a more detailed post on that topic before long.

In the meantime, I've been reading quite a lot. I just finished reading two other boatbuilding blogs and a forum thread start-to-finish, as well as a new book by Daniel James Brown titled The Boys In The Boat.

For the new boat builder, I highly recommend reading boatbuilding blogs, as they give fantastic firsthand insights from other amateur builders. I hope that my own blog here will be of some help to other builders, just as other blogs have been very helpful to me. Here are links to the blogs & thread that I recently finished reading:

1. Bob's Boat Build. (Building a 16' Glen-L Malahini Runabout)
http://bobsboatbuild.blogspot.com/

2. Chris' Glen-L Zip Build. (Building a 14'4" Glen-L Zip Runabout)
http://www.vupilot.blogspot.com/

3. Roberta's ZIP. (Forum thread on building a 14'4" Glen-L Zip Runabout). Outstanding craftsmanship, resulting in one of the finest Zips ever put in the water. Truly inspiring.
https://glen-l.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=10702

4. The book I just finished is The Boys In The Boat — Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It's a superbly-written true story, and probably the best book I've read since that summer in college when I read Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind. Many thanks to Wooden Boat Magazine for the e-mail notification on this one!
http://www.woodenboatstore.com/product/books_The_Boys_in_the_Boat/rowing_crew

Finally, here's a link to a must-read blog, (particularly if you're going to build a Glen-L Squirt):

Art's Boat Build http://artatkinson.blogspot.com/

Art built the most beautiful Squirt I've seen. I'm proud to say that I had the privilege of riding in this boat at the 2012 Glen-L Gathering. If you are considering a Squirt, but are concerned about the small size of it, I can say that the design is FAR more stable than I would have thought in such a small craft. The very first thing I thought to myself when I sat in his boat, "Work of Art," was: "Why didn't I finish building one of these?" The Squirt is a fantastic design, limited only by its two-person capacity.

Taking a ride in Art's Squirt, "Work of Art." September 2012.