Rufus 17 Plans

The RUFUS 17' motor boat is a simple rugged craft with jaunty good looks. She has 3 chines per side and plenty of freeboard and beam, giving her an excellent carrying capacity and very good stability. She can be made as a simple open launch, in which case she would make an excellent club boat, or she can have a wheelhouse/cabin. The standard wheelhouse has bench seating, stowage spaces and a forward central steering position. With this arrangement there is plenty of room in the aft cockpit for bench seating. The outboard is housed in a protective well and she could be fitted with an inboard engine.

Construction uses pre-shaped plywood hull panels and girder shapes which can either be stitched and taped together and the plywood frames inserted before finishing the chines in epoxy, or the ply frames and girders can be erected as a framework with square sectioned stringers at the chines and the hull panels then fitted. The 'V' gap between the side of the stringers and the adjacent hull panels can then be filled with thickened epoxy to form a very strong chine join. For those with limited building space and/or budgets, the hull may be built in four pre-fabricated sections for later assembly. She may be fitted out in a variety of different ways to suit the builders' own requirements.