I have built several small boats, mostly using the plywood stitch and glue method. The hulls generally don't take so long, it is all the other parts: foils, spars, rigging, etc that really eats up your time and frankly, money. A great way of approaching one of these projects is to get all the spars/rigging and even foils from a junker boat.
If someone is truly interested in home building, the best way to start is to build a tender. If a true beginner and unfamiliar with woodwork, pick up one of Dynamite Payson's boatbuilding books and build one of the 8 footers in there. The method is simple and cheap but requires a fair bit of sanding. If more ambitious, a glued lapstrake tender can be beautiful and a little faster because little sanding is required. The first boat I built was a Phil Bolger "cartopper" from Dynamite's $15 book.
I built this in 2010, took me and my father in law about 3 months of weekends total including homemade rig, oars, etc. Costed maybe $500. I sold it this summer for $500. It is a 12' centerboarder that re-sparked my love of sailing. Since then I built a few skin on frame kayaks, and a 24' outrigger sailing canoe which took me about 5 months. There is NO better feeling than that first launch day of your home built boat I can say that with confidence. You hop onboard and hope she floats, then you "break in" the boat and re-configure a few things to get it just right. It is a wonderful feeling, almost a feeling of independence, knowing that YOU built this and it is a success.
Here is a video of me and my father in law sailing my outrigger canoe this summer.
http://m.youtube.com/index?desktop_u...?v=V6V-uExqn04. Not exactly beach cat speeds, but the boat reaches a respectable 9 knots on occasion. It FEELS fast lol.
I have to say, building your own boat is highly rewarding, as much for the technical challenge as anything else. I usually build stuff in the winter when I can't sail anyway, and sail in the summer (though there is some overlap)... Some methods take much longer than others. Steel is quick to build, but requires some welding skills. Plywood hard chine is also quick and requires little skill, but requires much sanding and some people don't like the looks of hard chined boats. Glued lapstrake is supposedly fast once you get the hang of it, and requires little sanding, but only works well on boats up to a certain size. Other methods are much more time consuming, such as strip building, but the end result is better looking. People interested in home building should check out
The WoodenBoat Forum and
Boat Design Net - the Boat Design and Boat Building Site, the forums section. Do a few searches.
As the boats get bigger, home building becomes less practical I think. Anything over 20' becomes a significant project. The amount of savings versus buying a used boat in today's market is minimal to non existent. I mean I picked up my Hunter 25 for $3400 including marina fees for half a year (those fees would have come to about $2200) so home building something similar would have been financially non-sensible. But that said, there is real value to a home built. You KNOW how strong it is, and how everything comes together. You can build it to suit your own preferences, and if you build a high performance boat (think multihull or planing keelboat) there are actually significant cost savings in home building. I am enjoying my used boat for now, and rather than building a boat to suit me perfectly I am doing some minor modifications on the hunter to suit it better to my needs. Muuuuch cheaper and less work that way than trying a home built from scratch of that size... That said, I am saving funds to build a catamaran hopefully next year. Finding a place to build a large boat is the main problem for me, since I live in a very urban area. If I had a backyard, I already would have started the catamaran by now!
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