This is not a book for yacht-builders, but it is intended for beginners in the art of boat-building, for boys and men who wish to make something with which they may navigate the waters of ponds, lakes, or streams. It begins with the most primitive crafts composed of slabs or logs and works up to scows, house-boats, skiffs, canoes and simple forms of sailing craft, a motor-boat, and there it stops. There are so many books and magazines devoted to the higher arts of ship-building for the graduates to use, besides the many manufacturing houses which furnish all the parts of a sail-boat, yacht, or motor-boat for the ambitious boat-builder to put together himself, that it is unnecessary for the author to invade that territory.
Many of the designs in this book have appeared in magazines to which the author contributed, or in his own books on general subjects, and all these have been successfully built by hundreds of boys and men.
Many of them are the author's own inventions, and the others are his own adaptations of well-known and long-tried models. In writing and collecting this material for boat-builders from his other works and placing them in one volume, the author feels that he is fulfilling the wishes of many of his old readers and offering a[viii] useful book to a large audience of new recruits to the army of those who believe in the good old American doctrine of: "If you want a thing done, do it yourself." And by doing it yourself you not only add to your skill and resourcefulness, but, what is even more important, you develop your own self-reliance and manhood.
No one man can think of everything connected with any one subject, and the author gratefully acknowledges his indebtedness to several sportsmen friends, especially to his camp-mate, Mr. F. K. Vreeland, and his young friend, Mr. Samuel Jackson, for suggestions of great value to both writer and reader.
Dan Beard.
Flushing, L. I., Sept., 1911.
