Sample Articles From WoodenBoat Magazine

Here are ideas for how you, at any age and in any location, can get aboard to sail, get your hands dirty maintaining, or garner skills for building before you ever think of digging into your wallet to own a boat. The best boats for a beginner, truly, are Other People’s Boats.

Oscillating tools have many uses in boat construction and restoration. A number of manufacturers make them; the one shown here is by the German company Fein, which first developed oscillating saws for medical professionals to use in removing plaster and fiberglass casts. For boat work, the tools, fitted with appropriate saw blades, are adept at getting into hard-to-reach places, such as behind this coaming to cut off an old screw.

Many years ago, one of the big varnish manufacturers had a regular advertisement showing a cowering boat owner eyeing a brightwork project with a feigned expression of terror, and saying “Vvvvvvvvarnish?” Such fear is a common sentiment among would-be and occasional varnishers, and for good reason: Varnish provides excellent protection while showing the beauty of the wood, but it takes a consistent commitment of time and skill each year to maintain it. And achieving a good bright (aka varnished) finish requires...

Anyone who has built a boat knows that it is the near-perfect vehicle for teaching applied math and science, because these topics apply to all phases of a construction project. A boat can also be a vehicle for understanding a process that’s difficult to replicate on a screen. There are formulas, fractions, ratios, proportions. There is geometry everywhere—isosceles triangles, symmetry, perpendiculars, right angles, and bisecting angles.