Saturday, September 06, 2008

Must have boat building tool...


For those of us who build boats with an eye to getting out of the boatyard as fast as possible anything that makes it easier and faster to build a better boat makes sense.

A lot of people have trouble with the whole transferring things like bulkhead patterns and hull sections ( there being no right angles on boats of course...) and I have seen many varied and complicated means from simple compass to using a tick stick to building up amazing concoctions of battens and scrap wood using hot glue to hold the battens together ( sorry this last one just seems like a whole lot of fiddly work to me.).

I'm of the simple compass approach but recently in an old copy of the great French boatbuilding/sailing Magazine "Loisirs Nautiques" they reviewed a British product from M Power Tools called the "Perfect Butt" which is a profile scriber with a difference (and I won't even begin to say anything about that name...) and it takes the scribing shapes off with a compass into the rocket science world...This thing seriously rocks! Certainly anyone buildiing a boat or working on the interiors of boats will find this the right answer to fitting anything from bulkheads to furniture.

There is a video on the M Power site which you might want to check out though it is geared to home DIY folk but it gives you an idea of how simple and easy it is.

Last I looked it is available from a bunch of folks in the USA including Garrett Wade.