The numbers

How long does it actually take?

Every figure on this page comes out of logs kept by people while they were doing the work — not from a designer’s estimate, and not from memory years afterwards. Where there is no number yet, there is a dash rather than a guess.

542 boats are in the catalogue; 2 of them have a log on them so far. Example logs are excluded from every figure on this page — their hours are illustrative, and nobody should plan a year of weekends around invented numbers.

By kind of boat

Medians across builders. The per-foot columns are the ones that carry across to a boat nobody here has built yet — they are worked out per build and then medianed, not derived by dividing one median by another.

Type	Logs	Median hours	Median spend	Hours per foot	Cost per foot
Row	2	75	$2,992	6.1	$183

Where the hours go

Across every boat on the site. Hours are summed per builder first, so someone who logs a step in fourteen short entries doesn’t outweigh someone who logged it in one.

Step	Median hours	Builders	Entries	Total hours
Shop & Tooling	4.0	1	2	4
Plans & Lofting	1.0	1	1	1
Hull Panels	3.5	2	3	7
Stitch & Assembly	6.5	2	2	13
Fillets & Taping	6.0	2	3	12
Glassing & Epoxy	4.0	2	4	8
Hull Exterior	3.5	2	2	7
Deck & Coamings	5.0	1	1	5
Interior & Cockpit	18.5	2	4	37
Fairing & Sanding	24.0	1	1	24
Hardware & Fit-Out	3.0	1	1	3
Paint & Finish	10.0	1	1	10
Launch Day	14.3	2	3	29

Boats with the most to compare

The designs where more than one person has written it down, which is where the side-by-side comparison starts being worth something.

Boat	Plans from	LOA	Logs	Median hours	Median months
Northeaster Dory	Chesapeake Light Craft	17′ 0″	1	100	3.4
Polliwog 8	Devlin	8′ 0″	1	50	5.0