Navigator · new build
A John Welsford Navigator being built by members of the Lake Macquarie Classic Boatshed at Rathmines, NSW, with Steve Price, John and Fred doing the work. Navigator is a glued-lap plywood day sailer and raid boat.The club started cutting parts in September 2026, tracing card templates twice onto each ply sheet to save material, then flush-trimming the paired bulkheads, frames and centreboard case sides to match before notching them for the chine logs and stringers.
There will soon be more activity in the boatshed with the impending construction of a John Welsford designed " Navigator" this is a very popular day and Raid boat. This is going to be an interesting build which has different construction techniques to what we are used to.
The Navigator build begins, the first piece cut
Its taken a while to get into a rhythm on the Navigator build but John, Fred and I have got our heads around it now and made good progress today. In order to reduce wasting ply we decided to cut templates from card then laid them out down one side of the sheet and traced them out before flipping them to the other side to give two of each. Next week sees a lot of cutting and shaping.
We made more progress on the Navigator today with bulkheads 1 and 2 finished to size as well as both sides of the centreboard case
Here are some pics of the process of making the navigator components. After we marked them out on card we traced them onto one side of the ply sheet then flipped them to repeat on the other side as there are two of each part. We then cut the parts out with jigsaws making sure to stay outside the lines. Next step was to plane and sand one of each piece exactly to the line so we could then screw that to its twin and use a flush trim router bit in the router table to match the second piece to the first. We then went around the appropriate edges with a radius bit in the router table to create "soft" edges.
Nobody else here is logging a Navigator yet. See the boat.