Psst: Most Sailboat "kits" Aren't ACTUALLY Kits

Imagine buying a table kit from IKEA (www.ikea.com), getting it home, unpacking it, and finding that the instructions say “go to Home Depot, buy some wood, and make the legs for the table.” You’d be upset, because the word “kit” means a set of all the parts required to assemble a thing.

Most wooden boat kits are not like IKEA kits. You might not even think they are kits at all.

It’s perfectly natural that when you start to compare sailboat kits, you assume they will include, you know…ALL the parts you need to assemble the sailboat. Dream on, little dreamer. When comparing wooden boat kits, you should NOT assume your dream kit includes all the parts required to sail away in your dream boat.

When boat kit manufacturers use the word “kit,” they are not all using that word as most people commonly use the word. They may not include all of the parts you will need to assemble your boat; and, some of the “parts” provided in the kit may only be raw pieces of material from which you must manually cut or carve or plane the actual parts you need. Can you imagine hand-carving and hand-beveling a curved structural part of your boat from a 4x4 post? That would qualify as a boatbuilding nightmare for most people.

Statistics don’t exist for this, but I would bet many of these partial or primitive wooden sailboat kits never get completed because the buyer does not get what they expected and ends up overmatched by the task. Furthermore, from what you can see at wooden boat festivals, many of the boats eventually completed from such “kits’ are boats of “character” — which is boatbuilder parlance for when you turn defects into features.

At Puur, we use the word “kit” in the common sense way.

Puur Sailboats is committed to making boatbuilding more accessible to more people, so we have offer all the parts required to complete the boat, rig her, and go sailing. The parts are all ready-to-assemble; there’s never any sawing or planing required to assemble a quality boat from a Puur kit. (read more at www.puursailboats.com/method). Puur kits even include specialized tools that simplify the process and ensure the quality of your DIY dream boat.

Here is my advice for how to find the best sailboat kit for you:

1. Ask the provider: what other materials, tools, supplies, and accessories do I need to buy to complete the boat and go sailing? (FYI, our answer is simple: the only thing Puur doesn’t provide is the paint.)

2. Review a portion of the assembly manual for the boat kit, as these instructions will give you a feel for whether this particular kit is closer to “construction” vs. “assembly.” (You can download a sample of our manual and watch a video of that assembly step on the Puur Method page.)

3. Ask the manufacturer for a detailed sail-away cost estimate for the kit — including every item you will need to buy in addition to the kit. I’ve written more on how to do a cost comparison of boat kits in another blog post.

4. Get feedback from someone who has built a boat from the kit. For example, here’s a video interview with Brian K about his experience building the Puur 17 from the kit.

Make sure the kit you buy is going to help you create something you’ll be proud to sail for a long time.