Planning Stage

One of my "bucket list" items has always been, "Build a wooden rowboat from scratch".  However, you need many things to accomplish this task. Besides all of the tools necessary to cut and shape wood accurately you also need a place to do the work and above all, THE TIME TO DO IT!!

I saw a T shirt once that said, "I have a super power, I can turn wood into a boat!" Follow along with me as I go through building this Whitehall and you can have that super power.

Detailed plans for a 17 foot Whitehall rowboat.

My wife has been gifting me various tools over the many years we've been married so I've accumulated a nice garage full of hand tools and a few power tools as well.  The hand tools needed won't cost an "arm and a leg" and I've collected many over the years from garage sales and swap meets including hammers, screwdrivers, sanding blocks, saws and a very useful hand tool for this project, a hand plane. To build a boat like this it is also necessary to have an inexpensive table saw (can be had for less than $200) for cutting the strips for planking and laminating plus another power tool that comes in handy is a jig saw for cutting the molds and various parts that, when assembled, turn a pile of lumber into a boat.

A rowboat can be made without plans by people more skilled than I and it's possible that I could have made one without professionally designed plans but I didn't want to end up with a "Nailed It" boat so I purchased detailed plans for building a 17 foot Whitehall rowboat from a business called Glen-L Marine in California.  I used to pass their building in Southern California when I would drive down Rosecrans to visit customers in my former life as a regional manager for a tool & die distributor and always told myself that I would someday build one of their designs.

The plans arrived in the mail and I quickly spread them out on a table and was a little intimidated at first but then I saw that the plans also came with a short step by step guide.  As I read through the steps and found each corresponding drawing I quickly saw that if taken one part at a time, a novice woodworker could build a beautiful, functional boat that a family would enjoy many years.

Next step: Build the strong back, the structure on which the boat will be built.