Pete Culler on Wooden Boats: The Master Craftsman's Collected Teachings on Boat Design, Building, Repair, and Use

R. D. "Pete" Culler, John Gardner and Howard Chappelle are the "big three" of the American revival and preservation of wooden boats as an amateur endeavour. This book is not about the process of building any particular boat, but an excellent compendium of descriptions and advice on how to understand the type of boat you want to build and build it better.

Pete Culler is one of the great master craftsmen of wooden boats. After reading this book, I built a pair of oars following his design and learned to appreciate the difficulty of this challenging art. I refer to this valuable addition to my boat building library on a regular basis.

Although not a step by step manual on how to build a boat, this book puts in your hands an invaluable collection of information on many aspects of wooden boat design, construction, repair and use, collated over the years by the author in many phases of his life connected with boats.I would definitely recommend that anyone interested in boat design or wooden boat construction read this book which contains first hand experience and a lot of common sense as well as tricks, techniques and some theory which can make life a lot easier for anyone involved in the field.This was one of those few technical books I picked up and read almost cover to cover without stopping.

What can I say - There is nothing "sexier" than an hour glass transom, lapstrake planks, leather wrapped oars and a nicely curved bow.Wow, am I talking about a "boat" or "Jennifer Lopez" !?!Anyway,Thanks "Amazon", that was a soft bound magazine type book and it came nicely packaged and undamaged.I will order from you again!DG on the bay...

This reprint is well built, with great paper, excellent cover.This is all quite valuable, as this book will be refered to often and take it's place on my bookshelf with other treasured volumes.Pete Cullers books and articles reprinted within, represent traditional skills, attitudes and strategies any craftsman would benefit from. This is a must-read for boatbuilders. It should be required reading for technical writers, as well.

The book was as interesting as expected. While much of it has been published before in other formats, there was some new stuff and of course the perspective was a little different. A good introduction to the life and works of Pete Culler.

Not very descriptive, to me it was not worth the purchase of what I wanted to know about building small boats. You can find more information online that costs you nothing. Stuck it on the back shelf for limited research material.

If the boat-building bug has bitten you hard enough that you've already gotten more than a few "how-to-build the Pineapple Snipe on your lunch break in one week for spare change" tomes under your belt, and progressed into the realm of plans by Gardiner, the practical wisdom of Dynamite Payson, and maybe (gasp!) even taken a saw to some wood, then this book will be a pleasant companion on an end table by the fireside. One that you can dip into at random from time to time, soaking up the esoteric as well as the more mundane gleanings of Culler's lifetime spent messing about with boats. Don't expect to learn HOW to build a boat from this book, and you won't be disappointed. Instead, enjoy how Culler shares with you how to approach building boats you can use, how building meshes into a boat's usability, maintability, and enjoyability. Culler never goes "zen" on the reader, nor waxes on about how materials and methods "back in the day" were perfecto and today's not worth squat. Instead, his writing lets the discipline and insight of a Master shine through as an extension of the quietly enthusiastic sharing and tutoring he gave so freely of in his lifetime, and pours out a cornucopia of boat builder's lore of rare quality which helps one grasp the WHY of older techniques (both high-end and mass-market) and how to fit newer materials and constraints on construction into context with what went before. I wish I could rate this book higher than three stars, as I really like it (for what it is). But the muddy photos, small-sized drawings, lack of annotations, and failure to include plans and/or photos illustrating each of the boat types and construction techniques discussed in the text make a higher rating impossible. Hopefully somebody will address all of the discrepancies in a revised edition, and print it on quality paper. Meanwhile, if you're ready for it, and can accept this book on its own terms, then by all means buy it: you won't be disappointed.