Getting started
I did as much research as I could to select plans, but theres not a great deal of information on the net specifically about building drift boats. The hardest thing wasnt finding places to buy plans, the hard part was trying to verify if the plans were any good.
Also, most sites that sell plans dont give you a good look at the plans before you buy. This makes it really tough to evaluate plans for their ease of construction.
My critera for the drift boat were pretty simple. It had to be:
- Easy to build (and verifiably so)
- Big enough to comfortably fish 2 with a 3rd person rowing.
- Small/light enough to drag over sand flats and possibly rope or drag it around rapids if necessary.
- We didnt need big whitewater conquering capability, instead it was more important to have a boat that was light and easy(ish) to row.
We ended up with plans from Spira International for their 14 foot Canadian drift boat.
Now for those of you who just clicked that link, I dont want to get into the frame vs stich and glue debate. As I wrote, it was very difficult to get good info on just how easy it was to build a given plan. Even worse, very few guys have built boats using both methods so they could give good info.
So basically we picked the Canadian because it fit most of the criteria, and in my mind at least, it was easier to visualize how wed build it based on what the made available on their website
I bought the plan and downloaded it. Um, yeah. Let the fun begin. The "plan" from Spira is 6 sheets of drawings and about 4 pages of "instructions". Note that the instructions are generic instructions for any of the dozens of boat plans they sell, only portions of them are specific to the plans you just bought.
Right away, I found several errors in the plans, basically dimensions were off on some of the parts listed. eMail me if you want details, but safe to say, getting the plans didnt exactly inspire confidence.
But press on, press on, press on. First step, build the ribs.
JMH
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