For several years I have wanted a small sailboat that I could use on the lakes and reservoirs around our area. But I have never found one that I liked until now. The criteria that I set for my search was quite simple, or it seemed. We must be able to transport it on top of our car. It must be capable of carrying two or three people, unsinkable, made of wood, and I didn't want to have to run out and buy a lot special tools in order to build her. There are a lot of fiberglass and plastic boats out there but I am a bit of a traditionalist and I wanted a wooden boat. 

    One day while on an outing with my family on Catalina Island, I spotted several wooden dinghies that people were using as tenders for their yachts that matched my idea of the perfect boat. Of course there was no one around them for me to ask questions of, so I just put it all in the back of my brain for future reference. Then one morning a few weeks later I woke up early and was unable to get back to sleep and decided to search the Internet for information regarding sailing dinghies. The boats that I had seen looked as if they where home build so I started by searching the newsgroups for boat building information. In the newsgroup rec.boats.building I found information about a dinghy known as the D4 Dinghy and newly re-designed and renamed the D5 Dinghy. I followed a link and viola, it was just what I had in mind.


 Heather and I out for a  
sail in our completed D4.

     The D4 is a small three person dinghy that can be built at home out of three sheets of plywood using a method known as stitch and glue. The dinghy can be built for rowing, motoring, or sailing. Best of all you can download the plans for it for free at Jacques Merten's site www.bateau.com. This sounded to good to be true so I checked it out and sure enough it was true, free plans. Wow!  What a service. Is this guy nice or what. Besides offering the free plans, Jacques also offers for sale a more detailed set of plans with complete step by step instructions, sail kits, and epoxy and fiberglass kits. Buying the epoxy kits from him really saves money. I spent a week pricing supplies and he really means it when he says you won't find things for less elsewhere. Besides the great prices, they deliver to your door (shipping is included in the price) and I had my supplies in 4 days (from Florida to California). How's that for service?

Click on the links below to download the Free Plans in PDF form

US standard
http://www.bateau2.com/free/D5_free_US.PDF

Metric
http://www.bateau2.com/free/D5_free_m.PDF

      As you can see from below, after downloading and examining the free plans and reviewing the tutorials that Jacques has on his site, as well a reading reviewing the messages in his sites message board, I felt that I had enough information and confidence to take on the project.

So join us as Heather and I build our first boat.

The D4 can be built from inexpensive exterior plywood since it is completely coated with epoxy resin. I found some Lauan (a sub-specie of mahogany) at Lowe's Home Center for only a buck more than their cheap stuff. I am glad I went with it because as you'll see later, the Lauan finishes out wonderfully with a deep, rich look to it.

The first thing that we needed to do, after we ran out and purchase the wood, was to transfer the dimensions from the plans onto the wood. After that we of course cut out the pieces. This is a fairly easy task that doesn't require any special tools. In fact, all cuts were done using either a circular saw or a jig saw. I do have a cordless Makita circular saw with a 3-1/4 inch blade that worked wonders on all the curved cuts, but believe it or not you can make the same cuts with a 7-1/4 inch circular saw.

Next we assembled the pieces using a few small wood screws and plastic zip ties. This is were the term "Stitch and Glue" comes from. You literally stitch the boat together with the ties as if you were sewing together a pair of pants. This is done by drilling a few hole along the seams, inserting the nylon zip ties and tightening them up. This went very quickly. I was so amazed about how quickly and easily this went that I forgot to stop and take a picture. This photo is courtesy of www.bateau.com.

Here is the boat after we had stitched it together and taped up the seams with duct tape. The duct tape is to keep the fillet putty from running through the seams and out the bottom. The whole process of stitching and taping the boat together took Heather and I about three hours.

The next thing that we did was to make sure the boat was fit and true. So we leveled it and checked all the measurements to make sure that everything  lined up the way that it was intended.