Part 18: Building Our Trailerable Dreamboat

Another Exciting Day in the Boatshop—We Reach a Turning Point

Happily, there are a lot of crossroad moments when building a boat…days when you think you’re getting somewhere meaningful. When you can imagine completion and the joyous splash at the launch ramp. Or even when you set out on the first actual cruise.

This was one of those days on the SCOUT project, our 20’-on-deck displacement cabin cruiser, to be powered by a 9.9hp outboard. As many of you already know, she’s built over what was intended to be a sailboat hull, John Welsford’s beamy and stable double-ended lapstrake 6-Meter Whaler design.

Just to get us started, here’s the latest in our series of evolving doodles, imagining what the finished boat might look like:

…And here is one shot (more below) of the long-awaited threshold crossed today—cutting and loosely positioning the laminated hardtop we designed for the boat’s pilothouse. (So, today’s column will focus almost entirely on how we chose to build a strong, lightweight, frameless cambered lid that’s 7-1/2 feet in length and 70 inches wide amidships, plopped over a 6-foot-long pilothouse that just barely has standing headroom for my 5’ 10” (probably now 5’ 9”) frame.

Above - So, this is one of the first photos shot after we slid the cambered, frameless pilothouse roof in place. Happily, the approach used to bend sheets of marine ply over a form worked fine, creating a lightweight roof that is strong—just a thin envelope that rests on the rear pilothouse bulkhead and temporarily is perched on a forward bulkhead that’ll be removed once we complete work on the three-pane windshield that’ll sort-of resemble the doorskin mockup we did last year. (See next photo for that…)