# Lets hear some new and innovative ideas about building a Dory....



## MT4Runner (Apr 6, 2012)

One crazy idea I have is a rigid plywood floor with longitudinal stringers at the sheer and maybe midway between chine and shear.

It would be skinned with nylon like a skin on frame kayak or umiak.

deck the whole thing with more nylon skin and have a floating hoop coaming to which you’d attach a sprayskirt.


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## BGillespie (Jul 15, 2018)

Crabon fibre.

I'd like to try a build using laser cut and formed 16 ga aluminum skeleton frame, thats also acts as a jig, then covered with ply and glass. From the outside, it would look like a traditional wooden dory, but quicker and easier to build.

Instead of capping the sides of aluminum dory with tubing, you could bend them with a 1" radius die, for example. 

A few aluminum drift boat companies are skinning with UHMW, I think Pavati offers this as an option. .250" is readily available in 48" x 120" sheets, not sure about larger sizes.

How much side panel angle is too much?? Shawn's ideas about leaning the sides out way far seems to hold water...


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## jgrebe (Jan 16, 2010)

I'll play! I have two wood boats that don't see as much river time as they should because all the water around here is pretty rocky. The Boulder Boatworks boats are pretty hard to beat in rocky rivers and they made a few decked dories. I think Bob Gleason out of Telluride has one. It would be nice if one of the kayak companies offered a roto-molded shell that could get built out. Another idea is fiberglass shell. We used to make kayaks in the 70's from a vacuum bagged mold. It was pretty cool because it sucked a lot of the resin out leaving the strength but not the weight


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## Electric-Mayhem (Jan 19, 2004)

I'll one up you and say Blow Molded would be amazing. The Prijon boats that use it are completely bomber. I agree that a plastic Dory would be amazing. Might get disowned by a lot of the wood boat traditional crew though.

Chris Towles out of Jackson Hole made an amazing composite boat. It took him 6 years to build but its a beauty and incorporates a bunch of modern design ideas and construction techniques...



























































Highlights of this build are it being a foam core and fiberglass composite boat that every part was molded and vacuum bagged using similar techniques to high end sailboats. You'll notice the deck looks basically flat but is slightly angled towards the outside. You'll also notice that there are thin gutters around all the hatches that also flow downhill towards the outside to drain holes just under the gunnels. Essentially... instead of draining into the footwells.. most of the water that splashes in doesn't go into the footwells but instead flows into the gutters and out through the drain holes which makes for much less bailing. This, plus a drain out of the footwells makes for a boat that bails super fast.

Lots of other stuff that he innovated on like rocker profile, chine design, and other stuff. Its a really neat boat.

At the end of the day, neither the Boulder Boat Works plastic boats nor Chris's composite boats seem financially viable. The market isn't there and whitewater people can't afford to pay for these boats. Chris said, if he had to guess, would have ten thousand hours or more into building his boat. I'm sure if you set up a production like it would go way faster...but they'd have to be priced high to do it. His materials and tooling weren't cheap either. Each hatch was a customer 3 step molding process using foam core.

A rotomolded or blow molded boat would be pretty neat and possibly more economical if you could sell enough of them...but its a pretty niche product...so might be hard. I know Fretwater and High Desert Dories and Eddyline and others all sell their boats for like $20-25k for a GC Briggs style design...but I don't think any of them are getting rich doing it.


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## jgrebe (Jan 16, 2010)

Electric All good points and yes you will always be fighting with the traitionalists when introducing a new design, for a good reason. There is a a romanticism, practicality and tried and proven aspect to a wood boat that is hard to argue with. Having said that, I see a lot of adaptation to the weaknesses of wood construction in the current processes that might be avoided. This will never be a commercial market for the reasons you point out. However, I think there is a middle ground that could provide relatively inexpensive, reproducable hulls of high quality at a much lower cost than hand built .My personal pick is vacuum bagged fiberglass/kevlar construction


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## Electric-Mayhem (Jan 19, 2004)

Yeah...I agree that there is room for innovation while still sticking to roots of what a whitewater Dory is designed for. Fully composite boats are definitely one way. If you had a set of molds that you could pop 10-20 or more boats out of...it might be a great way to get boats out in a fast and consistent way once you got your process down. I know Chris mention using Resin Infusion too, where you basically do all the layups inside a vacuum bag, pressurize it, and then pump the resin through everything. It takes a lot of pressure and learning curve is steep...but if you get the process down then its just about the quickest and fastest and most economical way to do a composite boat. 

Kelly Neu is in the process of developing another avenue of streamlining using a CNC router. Not sure if she intends to sell kits or just streamline her own process...but she has it all laid out in CAD and then you just cut the pieces out on a CNC router and stitch and glue everything together. You can even have the router do the scarfing for you. Still takes some woodworking skill, but if you did it right it would have alignment tabs and would take a lot of the guess work out of it.


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## MT4Runner (Apr 6, 2012)

How about an entirely rolled tube frame with an HDPE shoe and ballistic nylon sides?


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## Electric-Mayhem (Jan 19, 2004)

I think a billet titanium Dory is the ticket... just use one of these... 




Definitely interesting to do the durable plastic bottom with fabric sides up high for lightness. Sounds like a big engineering challenge but I'm sure its doable.


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## MNichols (Nov 20, 2015)

How about a 3D printed boat ? The 3D printed boat breaks three world records simultaneously | Impactscool Magazine


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## MT4Runner (Apr 6, 2012)

jgrebe said:


> Electric All good points and yes you will always be fighting with the traitionalists when introducing a new design, for a good reason. There is a a romanticism, practicality and tried and proven aspect to a wood boat that is hard to argue with. Having said that, I see a lot of adaptation to the weaknesses of wood construction in the current processes that might be avoided. This will never be a commercial market for the reasons you point out. However, I think there is a middle ground that could provide relatively inexpensive, reproducable hulls of high quality at a much lower cost than hand built .My personal pick is vacuum bagged fiberglass/kevlar construction


If you’re talking about design, there isn’t really much new under the sun, boats have evolved and the wheel has been continually reinvented for centuries. Yes, there are some new ideas for a river use where we’re not really moving through the water but moving with the water.
Our dories are not much different than Grand Banks dories. The flare, width, and stem angle are similar. We have more rocker for obvious reasons.

EM’s chine question is a good one and something that has not been looked at for dories, but has been a major design iteration in whitewater kayaks.

Kevlar-glass is absolutel worth looking at. Need foam or a lot $$$ of Kevlar for stiffness in flat panel shapes.
Lavro had it figured out in glass. Back when Hyde and Clackacraft were doing chopper gun boats of short fibers, Lavro was building with hand laid woven roving. Long, continuous ropy fibers and lots of them. Heard there was a video of him dropping a boulder on a Clacka hull, demolishing it. Same boulder on the Hyde hull, destroyed. Same boulder on the Lavro, it bounced. Went boating in spite of chipped paint.

would be stupid easy to make a mold for these hulls. Still flat panels, just put the ribs on the outside. You could hand lay a glass boat one week and vacuum bag a Kevlar one the next.

A deck mold would be harder but not impossible. Towles has the right idea with standard hatch sizes. Get Beckson to build some big glass filled nylon hatches and sell a thousand at $100/ea.


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## MT4Runner (Apr 6, 2012)

Electric-Mayhem said:


> Definitely interesting to do the durable plastic bottom with fabric sides up high for lightness. Sounds like a big engineering challenge but I'm sure its doable.


Moderate engineering challenge. 3M is your friend! Between them and NASA, there are great means to bond dissimilar materials.

Since the sides are “developable” and not stretched/compound curves like an airplane wing, you don’t have to do uncoated fabric for conformability and later dope it for waterproof WSS. Fabric sides could be 30-oz PVC like your raft, and everyone has a patch kit.

Make your tube frame, try the fabric. If you hate it, you can always skin with aluminum.

Could really open source these things and assemble like LEGOs or AR15s. Hull from one vendor, deck from another. Mix and match.


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## MT4Runner (Apr 6, 2012)

MNichols said:


> How about a 3D printed boat ? The 3D printed boat breaks three world records simultaneously | Impactscool Magazine


Fascinating the way they printed it on a slope.

could absolutely print more densely below the waterline, open celled sides and densely at the gunnels. Decking options are endless.


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## MNichols (Nov 20, 2015)

I thought it was pretty cool, not to mention the fact you model it in 3D CAD software, so you can nudge, change, and play to your hearts content before the actual printing. Not sure about the various quality / tensile of the printing threads available, but I'm sure there's a choice among differing compounds given how long this has been a "thing"


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## Electric-Mayhem (Jan 19, 2004)

So... taking it another direction but still within the CAD area...

Bryan and I were chatting and it occured to me that Corran Addison, of kayak and SUP design fame, has been making CAD designed custom kayaks for the last 5 or so years. He has a factory in China that can take a CAD drawing and uses a 5 axis CNC router to carve out a plug, then overlays composites over the top, then dissolves the foam out of the inside. It leaves a rough finish on the outside, but with some sanding and filling and a nice finish coat the boats come out looking amazing. They are custom one offs...but it would be a pretty amazing way to get into a custom Dory that is more realistic and affordable then a 3D printed one. I think if we stuck to a smaller form factor like the Baby Briggs or maybe a 12' version that it would be not too bad. I think Corran charges $1800 for the design time and building the boat. Probably some shipping cost involved with it too but still very reasonable.


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## chuckd (Nov 25, 2014)

Get some soul build and row a wooden boat wrecking and fixing them is part of the whole adventure!!


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## Ever_Cat (Jan 20, 2009)

This is my first post to the WW Dories forum and I really don't know too much about them. I like whitewater and fishing so a dory would be a great addition to my quiver of boats. Hopefully one of these days.

A while back I learned about Hog Island Boat Works. They are located in Steamboat Springs, CO and they make rotomolded drift boats and skiffs. The LTD16 drift boat caught my attention (LTD 16 Drift Boat - Tech & Design Advantages | Hog Island Boat Works | Strongest Drift Boats & Skiffs | | Hog Island). It is a 16' rotomolded shell with 1" radius chines and some build-out options are available. These are largely fishing vessels, but the Media section of the website has photos and videos of the LTD16 in whitewater.

For both whitewater and fishing, I could see building this out with removeable compartments for multi-day trips and pulling the compartments when not needed for a fishing outing. For those of you that know such things, do the specs of LTD16 look reasonable for use as a whitewater dory?

As with all boats, one-size-fits-all is always a compromise, but to my untrained eye the LTD16 looks like it covers a lot of points. I don't have the tools or skillset to build a dory so buying an indestructible version could be a good fit for me. Please, coach me on this option.


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## jgrebe (Jan 16, 2010)

chuckd said:


> Get some soul build and row a wooden boat wrecking and fixing them is part of the whole adventure!!


Just some guys shooting the bull until winter is over. Let's see a pic of your boat!


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## MT4Runner (Apr 6, 2012)

Ever_Cat said:


> This is my first post to the WW Dories forum and I really don't know too much about them. I like whitewater and fishing so a dory would be a great addition to my quiver of boats. Hopefully one of these days.
> 
> A while back I learned about Hog Island Boat Works. They are located in Steamboat Springs, CO and they make rotomolded drift boats and skiffs. The LTD16 drift boat caught my attention (LTD 16 Drift Boat - Tech & Design Advantages | Hog Island Boat Works | Strongest Drift Boats & Skiffs | | Hog Island). It is a 16' rotomolded shell with 1" radius chines and some build-out options are available. These are largely fishing vessels, but the Media section of the website has photos and videos of the LTD16 in whitewater.
> 
> ...


If you have the budget, can’t recommend against it. Love the idea of a rotomold boat and modular compartments.

16’ is still a bit big for solo use. 14-15’ would be a better “quiver of one” dory just like a 16’ raft or cat is big for your only option.


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## Electric-Mayhem (Jan 19, 2004)

A plastic boat seems like a really good way to make it durable. People beat the hell out of kayaks made of that stuff. Kinda wish it was fully decked from the factory like the picture at the top. Still...if you need to bounce and bash your way down the river that seems like a decent option.


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