Liz

In Festival Boats, Festival Boats 2024

The Liz is an elegant pulling boat designed by Ken Bassett of Onion River Boatworks. This 18’5” Pulling/Sculling craft was originally a lapstrake construction with bench seats. Under Ken’s direction, we lofted his lapstrake plans to a marine CAD program and developed it for the natural wooden beauty of cove & bead strip building with epoxy resin and fiberglass cloth providing strength and protection. The great benefit of the strip-built version is that we can shed about 30 lbs. of weight compared to lapstrake. Coupled with a Sliding Rowing Seat, this sleek and elegant design will provide you with all the sculling style exercise you want while including a great deal of stability, much more than a typical rowing shell. Note that you can carry a passenger in our version of this pulling boat, something you wouldn’t be able to do in a rowing shell. She is a beauty that effortlessly glides through the water.

This specific Liz is a commissioned custom-built boat built by Newfound Woodworks for a private client. She was started in early fall of 2023 and was crafted using the Stapleless method, using only cedar strips, wood glue, epoxy, fiberglass, and varnish over a set of forms. Her hulls is constructed of 3 types of Cedar: Western Red, Alaskan Yellow, and Northern White, with a single Mohogany strip. She is accented with Mahogany gunnels and keel, and Spanish Cedar: deck, stems, transom, and stern fan seat. We worked on it every Saturday (including quite a few evenings when we had some available time) throughout the winter and finished the third week of June 2024.

The great benefit of the strip-built version is that we can shed about 30 lbs. of weight compared to lapstrake, which brings the weight of the cedar strip version to 85 lbs.

More information available on our Liz design at: newfound.com