Jim Michalak

Mayfly14 is a straight forward flat bottomed plywood skiff for sailing and rowing. She's easy to build because her planks have no twists. That means that the chine log and wale bevels are constant for all practical purposes and can be presawn before...

Can you walk this plank? Actually the request was for a stand up paddle board, sort of like a surf board that is paddled while you stand up like on a real surf board shooting the big waves in Hawaii.I had all sorts of reasons for not designing it, the...

Imresboat is a slimmed up version of Larsboat which was designed for Lars Hasselgren to replace a Folboat that had finally met its end. Lars wanted capacity for two, plus decking, as with his old Folboat. But Imre wanted something more slender and...

Ladybug is a lot like Woobo which was one of my first designs. There was a Woobo near here for a while. I never got to sail it but was told it would really fly. (That boat was made of Lauan plywood from Home Depot which fell to pieces after rainwater...

Jonsboat is just a jonboat. But where I live that says a lot because most of the boats around here are jonboats and for a good reason. These things will float on dew if the motor is up. This one shows 640 pounds displacement with only 3" of draft. That...

Woobo was designed for the "perfect skiff" competition that Wooden Boat magazine had about ten years ago (hence the name "Woobo"). I didn't win anything and the experience led me to never enter another contest. Although the contest was well conceived I...

Long time readers may recall this design as being in the prototypes section a while back. One was being built and nearly completed when the builder had to put it aside to work on some realities of life, something that happens to all of us from time to...

Eventually I tweaked Mixer to have a "through the water" bow. It's the same change that Roar went through to become Roar2. I called the new boat Mixer2 and here are some lines of it.The rest of the boat is identical to Mixer although it appears that I...

"Dear Jim, I've got to tell you - that little AF4b of yours is a marvel.I've logged close to a thousand miles on her so far, through streams,rivers, canals, bays, sounds, and even one unplanned foray intothe wide Atlantic*; in blazing sunshine, driving...

Here is a boat that is supposed to be self righting to a great degree without ballast! Jewelbox has the combination proven by Bolger's Birdwatcher of high sides with a thick bottom and low down crew weight to act as ballast. Karl James told me his boat...

Piccup Pram was my first design to get built. Here is a photo of Chris Feller's up Chicago way. She is shown with the original 55 square foot rig. I still have the boat. The sail rig has been experimented with many times but the hull is identical today...

Toto has been my most successful design. Initially she was an experiment to test a new bow shape - a deep V bow that blends into a multichine well aft. There's a twist in the bow bilge panels and at the time I didn't know how to expand those panels on...