Clinker – Building Wooden Boats

This is an e-book in PDF format. It is a digital file that you can download and read on your own device.

The e-book is designed to work best in landscape view. You may download the e-book up to 5 times. We recommend saving the file to your own device after purchase.

A beautiful, durable and safe boat does not come into being by chance. It takes a boat designer to create forms that are both beautiful and fit for their purpose. It takes a boatbuilder, with knowledge and skill, to choose fine materials and build strong structures — and in doing so, to bring the designer’s ideas to life in the finished boat. If you want to own such a boat, you should build it yourself. And in many ways, it makes sense to build it from wood. After reading this book, building such a boat will be within your reach.

In this book, I describe my own journey with this craft, and the growth of my own understanding. At the same time, I describe the process of building a wooden rowing boat from a table of offsets and a lines drawing into a finished boat. Along the way, I gather the forms, materials, tools and techniques needed to build a boat that is good enough — and right for me.

The Nordic clinker boat tradition has been inscribed on UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage. One of the key ways this tradition is kept alive is through amateur builders. This book is written for anyone interested in wooden boats and working with their hands: for those planning to build a boat, for those already practising the craft, and also for the person who may only come to this book years or decades from now. In telling my story, I am preserving my own part of the clinker boat tradition between these covers.

The book has 313 pages.