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Foils

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Dudley Dix

Making and Shaping Sailboat Foils

This article is intended to explain the basics of making and shaping wooden rudders, daggerboards and centreboards for leisure use. Your results may not be up to snuff for top level competition but your foils should be at least as good as those produced out of moulds by most production fibreglass boatbuilders. Most of this discussion is about dinghy foils but the general principles apply to large and small boats.

Gluing blanks from cedar planks. These were for my own Paper Jet skiff.

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Didi 38 & Didi 40CR

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Dudley Dix

OWNER-BUILT BOATS WITH GREAT PERFORMANCE

Beautiful interior woodwork of bill Connor's Didi 40cr Alizée. Top quality amateur woodwork.

Radius chine plywood, as a boatbuilding method, started as an experiment and developed over the next decade to where it became a major part of my design business. About half of my new commissions in the past 20 years have been for this method in one form or another, from small day-sailers through to large cruising catamarans.

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O'Connor Wooden Boats

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Tony O'Connor

Thoughts On Turning Boats

The majority of boat designs for amateur builders nowadays are built upside down. There are good reasons for this, gravity is your friend, and long panels and planks can be laid on the building frame for fitting, especially for shorthanded work as there is no need for complicated sticks to shore up planks. Also sanding fairing and painting an upturned hull is far easier.

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