While I was living in the Philippines from 2002 till 2013, I decided to build a boat from plywood for myself. Luckily I took some pictures from the building process and put them together for a slide show video on YouTube. The video became a great success and has still many visitors every day.

While the video only shows pictures with some background music, I would like to explain some more details about the techniques I used in the building process on this website.

The boat I wanted to built, was supposed to be a dive boat, that would be able to bring me and maybe some friends to the reef in front of our house and to some other dive sites in the area.

Building a Simple Boat First

However, to try my skills and learn the techniques of boat building, I decided to build a very simple canoe first before I approached the bigger one. The plans for canoe I found for free in the internet and all I had to do was to cut the two side panels and the bottom after the plan and stick them together with fiber mat and epoxy resin using the stitch and glue method.

This was the simple and easy to build canoe I built first

To strengthen the form and the boat, battens were glued to the upper edge of each side panel and the raw buddy of the boat was done.

Will The Plywood Last?

To make the plywood real waterproof, the whole body must be painted with 2 - 3 coatings of epoxy resin. Finally the boat would get a painting with acrylic or epoxy paint.

After the canoe was done and successfully tested in the sea I started to build my dive boat.

I call it a dive boat but after the plans it is actually called a fishing punt or you may also just call it a skiff.

How long does it take?

Although I assembled the canoe in a few days, it took me several weeks for the second larger boat to finish. But you can also do it in a week or so if you stay on it.

After all I can say it is really fun to build your own boat and you may want to build even more but don't know where to put them...