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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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 po...
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Trim and some rigging and fittings

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I’m nearing the home stretch, which involves a lot of small tasks. Many of these tasks are just for appearances. For example, I wasn’t careful enough when painting the gussets on frame 5 so they looked kind of sloppy and were bothering me. A small piece of scrap wood epoxied in place cleaned it up nicely though.   The centerboard trunk also needed a cap.  The cap needs at least one opening for the centerboard lines to pass through to use to raise and lower the centerboard. I also cut a good size opening in the aft end of the cap so I could see the centerboard to check it’s height and unstick it if necessary.  I’m also going to attach the centerboard cap with screws but no epoxy so it is removable if I need more access to the centerboard.   The tiller is made out of Sapele too.  I had to deviate from the plans a little bit and added a second layer of wood on the bottom of the tiller so I could lower the hole for the pivot bolt to raise the tiller and prevent it f...
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