Overview | Construction | Building the Schooner Step by Step

Our schooner will be a working boat, in service year round. If she were built using traditional construction materials and techniques, she would require constant maintenance with potentially long periods out of service. Availability of the quality of materials that the original was built from was another issue.

The final deciding factor was that we wanted the boat to be as exact a replica of the original in looks as possible and she was going to be built mostly by volunteers that did not necessarily have boat building experience.

Since we were working from a set of plans and table of offsets, the mold frame method seemed the best choice. And, because of the rarity of traditional materials and need for low maintenance along with our desire for the boat to look like the original, it was decided that we would use a composite technique.

Much has been written lately about saving old, planked wooden boats by cold molding several wood/epoxy layers over the existing hull. Then Reuel Parker started building new boats in Florida laminating plywood and diagonal layers over longitudinal planking, using epoxy. We started experimenting with these methods on smaller boats.

We settled on our own combination of these methods. We would build the schooner using the original cypress planking on yellow pine frames, but the cypress planking would be much thinner than the original. Outside of this first layer we would bond one or more layers of plywood with epoxy. One or more layers of polypropylene cloth set in epoxy would in-turn protect the plywood.

The result will be that when visitors look inside the schooner they will be able to see how the original looked, cypress and pine. And, viewing the outside the boat will also look the same. You will see paint! The difference will be cost and ease of construction and vastly reduced maintenance schedule.