Class Globe hull 181 builders blog

October started with dry fitting the panels on the stringers. We started off with panel 3, followed by 2 and 1 on both sides. We then beveled these panels after which we mounted panels 10 and 9 on both sides. We found ourselves being a bit frightened dry fitting the number 8 panels, but after some procrastinating behavior we also mounted these.  The number 8 panels were indeed quite the challenge. Due to the significant bending and twisting of this panel it was hard to determine how to attach them. We sawed off a piece of the starboard panel, which in the end was not necessary. Luckily the panel still fitted on all three stringers for the whole length of the panel. Ironically, we mounted the unmodified portside panel in a fraction of the time of the starboard panel and without much problems.  With all the starboard and portside panels mounted, a new round of beveling began in order to fit the bottom panels. Planing everything by hand was a tough workout, but seeing the beveled...

After a nice and long summer holiday in which we sailed the seas of Croatia with our kids, we were fully reloaded and ready to continue building our boat. At this moment we had mounted the frames, including the stem, on the jig and we had put the keel timbers and bunksides into place. The meant we were ready for the stringers!  The stringers were temporarily stored in our home office in the garden. So, after months of seeing them during working hours and imagining how they would look on the boat, it was finally time to actually see how they would fit! Since the stringers were longer than our garage and we could therefore only work with the garage door opened, we had to finish the mounting (and with that the shortening of them) of every stringer we started with before calling it the day. We were quite surprised by how relatively easy the stringed bended around the frames from the back until frame D. Mounting the final part of the stringers on frame E and the stem proved to be more ...

We were still in doubt where to set up the jig and construct the actual boat. We have a garage attached to our house, but with a length of just above 6 meters and a door width just under 3 meters it is not that specious for building a Class Globe 5.80. In addition, in order to fully use this 6 x 3m, we would have had to remove a radiator, storage cabinet and rearrange the racks inside the garage. On the other hand, if we were able to build it in our garage, we could just go and continue building the boat at every spare moment.  After measuring the garage again and thinking out other options (e.g. building the boat inside a tent in the garden), we decided that the garage would be the best place for building our Class Globe. We decided to put the jig on wheels so we could move it around a bit in the limited space and, not totally unimportant, to get the boat out of the garage once it is finished.   We had to be quite inventive for setting up the supports for the S-frame in the c...

On April 9th a big lorry pulled up in our driveway, did someone order a building kit?  Laying at the end of the drive way, nice and stacked, it did not look like a whole lot. Once we sorted everything out and put it in our garage it looked totally different: Wood… Everywhere…  Luckily spring just started and with the nice and sunny weather ahead, we constructed most of the frames outside in our garden. As suggested by other builders, we started off with frame E, followed by frame A and the transom. These frames we pretty straight forwards with limited room for error, since these frames could be fitted in just one way.  Frame B, C and D were more challenging in getting all the measurements right.  When we looked closer to our assembled (and glued…) B frame, we noticed that is was asymmetrical. We checked it again, and something went wrong indeed. Since we really did not want to see troubles mounting the stringers, there was no other option that to carefully chiseling ...

Midway in February we received our registered hull number. We speculated about which number it was going to be: maybe our house number 196? It should be a number close to it! We ended up with 181, a nice palindromic sequence, we were quite satisfied with it!  Once we received our number, we ordered the CNC cut building kit and the additional wood elements at the Kolibri-jachtbouw company.  So... Are we really going to build our own Class Globe 5.80? YES!  In our heads we already saw our boat surfing the waves and our children were already busy choosing color schemes for it. In reality, we had no clue what to expect: can we pull this actually off? How difficult is it? How long will it take? Will it be strong enough? And… where are we even going to build this thing? To be continued!

It was February 2022 when we read about the Class Globe 5.80 in the Dutch sailing magazine “Zeilen”. It was the story about the maiden voyage of hull number 78, as was built by Pim van den Brink from the Kolibri-jachtbouw company (the official supplier of the building kits in the Netherlands).  After reading the article, we both knew that this was the perfect project for us and soon afterwards we visited Pim in his workshop.  Pim gave us a tour and showed us how the CNC cut building kits were made and how the the different kinds of building materials looked. We were absolutely stoked about the idea of sailing the seas with our own hand-crafted boat, so as soon as we came home we ordered the plans!