Building a kit boat in stages

The boat is nearly complete now,thats another Didi Mini Transat pile of plys to the right waiting to be built next.
Note,we supply a free CD disc with many building stage pictures on it,this will allow you to see what each stage will look like as you proceed with your build.

We were sharing premises at this time with Errol,of 'S Products',the steel boat construction you can see was one of a number of Dix 38 yachts they built,we later moved out to our own larger premises,where some seven years later we still are today.

The black parts visible on the bulkheads,is black plastic taken from a dustbin liner bag,its a way of ensuring the scraps of 9mm plys used to sandwich the joints when we screw them together can be seperated easily later on.

These bulkheads are just asking to be set up on the building stocks,which was to be stage three,as the floor space was first used to assemble the CNC cut bulheads,which was done on a sheet of 9'x6'x 3/4" (2.76mtr x 1.86mtr x 16mm) chipboard sheeting.

The assembly of the various bulkheads is stage two,its a boat by numbers in some ways?

Making a start,you have to start someplace,so releasing all the bulkheads is a great way to start!

The very first bulkhead being cut from a Didi Mini Transat,given a total of twelve days actual building time, I was then looking a completed hull.

One of the quite usual questions asked by our kit buyers is How Long Will It Take,and Is It Easy,which are questions we can only reply to by saying, it depends on the buyer as much as anything?as you have to put in the hours,the boat will not build itself. Lets start at the beginning,the pictures show me at the start of a Didi Mini Transat build,an order that came in to build a complete boat,at this stage I was unsure of the time scale,as I had never built one before,so in many ways I was a beginner too.To my surprise,stage by stage,spread over a number of weeks, the work went remarkabley well and some twelve (12) (seven hour) actual building days later, I was looking at my first completed hull!This prooved not to be a fluke,as I then built another one,also in twelve days,the Didi 26 hull build that followed took me all of fifteen (15) days.