Alix and Steve from Acorn to Arabella have been forced to tear down and rebuild the boathouse by the local building inspector, a struggle they have been sharing on their Facebook and Instagram pages. Those like Acorn to Arabella and Sea Dreamer Project are posting real-time updates in those feeds which gives you a glimpse into the project as it currently stands. The secret to keeping up with the many boatbuilders getting after it in their backyard boat shops is following their Instagram channel. This is a huge addition to the Acorn to Arabella boatyard which exemplifies the camaraderie of the boat building community – a tight-knit group that shares advice, shares resources and passes down tools that have outgrown one shop but will launch another into a whole new level of productivity. A fall visit to Gannon and Benjamin’s amazing boat shop in Vineyard Haven on Martha’s Vineyard landed the Acorns with a new, but very old and “experienced” antique thicknesser. Having the right tools to accomplish all these jobs is something the team worked to set up before they started, but along the way, they made some good friends with years of experience, advice, and some extra tools on hand to share. It just means more work bunging and flattening the boards which will be bent around Arabella’s frames and forced into her curvy lines. When she does, we’ll document that, too.As the Acorn to Arabella team works through their stash of boards for planking their Atkins ketch, they are finding more pieces with defects that require attention in order to be useful. In a five-year span our fans have watched trees become a boat that will cross oceans. All of the goals we put here five years ago, we’re pretty much doing: uploading a video once a week and making frequent Facebook and Instagram posts. This page originally said, “If we can inspire you, convince you to follow along and help us out a little, then maybe, just maybe, we can leave our jobs and build full time.” And we’re doing that now. We started with bi-weekly videos, but we’re now working on the boat full time and we are releasing one video a week to document it all. If we had continued working full time and building part time we expected to take a total of 6-10 years to build Arabella. That is the why and how, and whether we can continue depends on you. We showed a bunch of people that you could weld bronze into the prettiest (and mighty strong) jewelry one can put in a bilge. YouTube went absolutely bonkers when we made a smelter and poured that lead into a mold on video. Almost 100% of the lumber will be harvested from our property we mill boards on a small portable sawmill. We’ve foraged for and handled 12,000 lbs of scrap lead for a ballast keel. Everything for Arabella will be sourced as locally as possible, this is very important to us. Steve started as an amateur wooden boat builder building a 38' wooden sailboat in his backyard: designer William Atkin's Ingrid with a Stormy Petrel's gaff rig. When we say “build” we mean just that, from scratch, in our front yard, with our own hands. Acorn to Arabella is a wooden boat building project taking place in Granby, Massachusetts. Thanks to people who document what they do, we all learn that new, difficult, apart-from-the-norm things are worth doing. We are documenting every aspect of the build as we go-we hope to inspire people through our videos on YouTube because we’ve been inspired by others who chose not only to do difficult things, but to also share how they did it. Once she’s launched, we intend to take her to the most far-flung corners of the world. Atkin calls this design Ingrid (when marconi-rigged) and Stormy Petrel (when gaff-rigged) and our boat will be named Arabella. We are building a 38’ wooden sailboat designed in 1934 by William Atkin. The challenges of building a boat are real, the journey will be long, but the rewards will be magnificent! What’s going on in Western Massachusetts, two hours from the ocean? When we started, our idea was met with healthy doses of skepticism, admiration, and even envy.
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