Reddit reviews The Sharpie Book

Good books, with some notes:

Dierking's Building Outrigger Sailing Canoes Excellent reference for building any plywood boat, but you should be careful. This book will seduce you. Gary's an expert on making a single outrigger boat that works, is pretty, and is fast and easy to build. You'll buy the book to read and end up the next weekend heading off to Lowes to buy plywook, and ordering an epoxy kit from Raka. These boats are faster and more capable than anything but quite a big monohull, are simple to build, you can sail them yourself, on most of them you can take someone out with you, it's hard to see why anyone would build a ever build 15' dinghy instead of an Ulua or a Wa'apa, honestly, unless there was a racing class they wanted to get into. Highly recommended.

Payson's Go Build Your Own Boat Very good, very readable, some stuff that I still wonder about. Edge nailing into 1/4" ply, for example. How was that supposed to work? But the basic ideas of get it done fast and go sailing still apply.

Stambaugh's Good Skiffs Good, readable, interesting introduction to traditional heavy skiff construction as well as stitch and glue. The traditional methods are usually ignored, but if I were going to build a skiff I wanted to keep in the water I might pick that. The heavy skiffs sail really well, are enormously strong, are self-righting, they have a lot of advantages.

Andrew C. Marshall's Composite Basics Good intro to composite work. Technical but readable. Good reference.

Gougeon Bro's On Boat Construction Classic, necessary. Very good coverage of all kinds of stuff, really good.

Russell Brown's Epoxy Basics: Working with Epoxy Cleanly & Efficiently Expert level epoxy tricks. This is the stuff that will amaze people at the next messabout. Read the Gougeon Bro.'s book first, then read this.

Michalak's Boatbuilding for Beginners and Beyond Good. Kind of basic stuff, but if you need a book on figuring out centers of effort and basic rudders and boards and stuff it's fine. The boats are plain and kind of simplistic, but they sail fine. For the most part they don't go to windward in any kind of impressive way, but really who wants to be bashing to windward all the time anyway? They're not racing boats, and for dinking around they're great. Don't build his proa; no one ever has, and there's probably a reason for that. The rest of the boats range from fine to quite good (the Laguna is probably the best of his designs).

Bolger's Boats With An Open Mind Classic, great. A must-read. Even if you never build one you'll learn a huge amount from this.

Other Bolger books: 30-Odd Boats, Folding Schooner: And Other Adventures in Boat Design. Anything he wrote is worth reading. I mean, not the novel, but any of his boat books.

Parker's The Sharpie Book Very good intro to sharpies of all sizes.

Little known classics:

A 30', $6,000 Cruising Catamaran : Built, Sailed and Written About Hardcover – 1987 by Roy F. Chandler
I mean, don't pay $48 for it, but if you see a copy in a used bookstore it's worth a few bucks. Some of his 'tricks' for saving money don't translate very well ("My friend gave me this huge bucket of stainless hardware", hey, good idea! I'll try that), but it's a good general outline of turning a worn out racing cat into a small cruising cat on not much money.

Finally, for a lost classic: Chapman 's The Plywood Boatbuilder Vol 41 Excellent and readable look back at what early plywood designs and construction looked like forty years ago. I wouldn't build any of these, there are better designs around now, but it's fascinating to see how the thing developed. Designs for prams and dinghys, sailboats, outboard, runabouts, 47 designs, sailboats from 13 ft to 24 ft.

But really, a great and cheap way to read a lot about boatbuilding is to get hold of old copies of Wooden Boat or some of the other boating publications. You can often pick up a stack cheap or free. In depth articles, lots of pictures, I learned a lot from stacks of ten year old mags people gave me. In fact, I have a big stack of Wooden Boat and some other stuff I need to get rid of right now. Anyone want them? Free to good home, paypal me back the shipping when you get them. Send me a PM if you're interested.