Welcome

Welcome! This is the story of my Glen-L 15 sailboat build. 


This is a 15’ long wooden sailboat I am building at home from a set of plans I ordered from Glen-L. It will be my first sailboat so I’m looking forward to learning to sail on it.

This is what I hope it will look like when I am finished:

This is my current progress:

I spent a few weeks looking at several sailboat plans and chose the Glen-L15 because I wanted a traditional Bermuda rig (the classic triangle sail on either side of the mast).  Glen-L also had a long history and great reputation, an active online community, and sold hardware and rigging kits for this boat. 

Construction will be plywood sheathing on a solid wood frame. 

The links below are in chronological order, as they are best read
I read a couple of other builder’s blogs before I decided to tackle this and they were really helpful, so I wanted to return the favor and hopefully help someone else…

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Building the spars

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The spars are the wooden “poles” that hold up the sails and consist of two pieces: the mast (the tall upright post) and the boom (the horizontal member that attaches to the mast and swings to control the angle of the main sail).    The mast is made from a 22’ long piece of 3” x 4” Sitka spruce. It is tear drop shaped in cross section and tapered getting narrower at the top, so I will have to shape it out of a rectangular board. Sitka spruce was hard to find.  The only place I could find it was a boat building store near Toronto, Noah’s Marine, which is about a three hour drive and in a different country.  Luckily I had to drive to Toronto anyway so I stopped on the way. Even then, I couldn’t find a piece big enough to make the mast out of one piece (which I expected), so I had to make it out of several pieces. I bought 6 boards each about 1” thick by 4” wide by 12’ long, which I spliced in pairs to make three 22’ long lengths that I’ll stack and glue to make a single 3” x 4” x 22’ long
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The Plans

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The plans were delivered quickly and included Five sheets of detailed drawings Two sheets of full size patterns for all parts A 15 page instruction book Glen-L also published a Building Plywood Boats book that I bought.  I hung up the plans to study them before I started building with a goal of being able to picture the entire build process in my head. It took a full day of reading (and re-reading) the plans to get mostly there.  The plans have a very old fashioned feel to them, which is no surprise given their age. In fact the plans had an almost familiar feel to me. Then I remembered we had a set of Popular Mechanics books when I was a kid and one of them had an article on how to build a boat out of plywood at home. I used to pore over the pictures and instructions in that article and think how fun it would be to actually build something like that. I am pretty sure now that those were Glen-L plans I was looking at way back then, albeit for a different boat (a one-man power boat to th
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