A Rowing Boat in Vendia Marine Plank

I finally started the build of a Niko recreational rowing boat design from Finland. My desire was to display the boat at the current Australian Wooden Boat Festival, with the dual goals of promoting recreational rowing and use of sustainable timbers for boat-building. Sadly, problems of time and money not being together in the same place long delayed making a start and the boat, although a quick build, wasn't ready for display.

So I'll document the build here as well as I can, and try to make up the missed opportunity of having it on display at the AWBF. I plan to make good use of it once finished, so building and using the Niko will be subjects for this blog.

Vendia Marine Plank is a product from Finland that is essentially plywood (my key interest at Huon-Ply Boats) but with the surface veneers sliced rather than rotary cut, giving an attractive appearance of traditional sawn timber planks.

It comes in 3 metre lengths and a variety of widths and thicknesses, but not the wide plywood sheets we are used to here. Its a specialised product developed for building timber boats, and given that 'engineered' timbers are widely used in other areas of timber contruction, something suited to boat building seems inevitable, that was what piqued my curiosity to get a sample.

The Niko design by Jarmo Häkkinen, a Finnish professional boat designer, is a 2-place recreational/fitness rowing design based on the popular timber racing boats developed in that country from their traditional lake and river transport designs.

Below is an image of the Vendia Marine Plank package that I obtained from Vendia (my thanks Lenka Trebaticka) for the project.

On the left are thin 6mm planks: 8x  6mm*200mm*3m, 4x 6mm*275mm*3m, 4x 6mm*350mm*3m (each 5x2mm plys 4 longitudinal,1 transverse), on the right are 16mm thick planks.