Raising Real Men

  We both have great memories from childhood–spending time on the water with our dads or grandfathers, fishing with friends, or exploring lakes and ponds near our homes. The water’s still there, but we didn’t have a boat to share with our own children, and we didn’t have the money to buy one. Then we got…
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I once saw a documentary about a German appliance company. New employees spent six months learning to use basic metal tools–basically, a half a year devoted to filing blocks of metal. Maybe it works in Germany, but I’ve always learned better if I had an immediate, practical use for the new skill. So the boat…
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When I went looking for plans for small, home-built boats, I found a whole community of people working on the question–can you build a usable boat with a single sheet of plywood? The answer is a qualified but enthusiastic YES. It’s qualified because you’re pushing the limits of marine architecture–we don’t know yet how much…
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Ever hear the phrase, “from stem to stern”?  Okay, this is the stem. I decided to approach this boat project with a few design goals – (1) Start simple. We’ve build some things before but never a boat, so we found a plan with some good instructions to see if we could learn how boats…
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What do you do when you want a boat for vacation but you don’t have one to borrow and can’t afford to buy? Daniel Beard said build your own! Every year we spend some time at my family’s little lake house in South Carolina, relaxing, writing, and doing some planning. We have a kayak we…
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