From lofting to launch - a renowned school of wooden boat building

On the Huon River at Franklin in Tasmania is a school with a difference. We teach the old traditional skills of wooden boatbuilding to a new generation of craftspeople from all over the world. The Wooden Boat Centre Tasmania’s learning centre provides the only nationally accredited, trade-level Certificate course in wooden boatbuilding in Australia. This is the only boatbuilding school where students on the course create a full-sized, carvel planked, sea-going cruising vessel "from lofting to launch", or undertake a complete restoration of a full-sized sea-going vessel, as the key component of their program.
The main emphasis is on the use of Tasmania’s unique boatbuilding timbers – the legendary Huon Pine, as well as King Billy Pine, Celery Top and Tasmanian Blue Gum. Using timbers of this quality and scarcity is a cherished privilege: it demands a commitment to high-quality craftsmanship in the building, and longevity and repairability in the product.

Many of the school’s graduates have gone on to build careers in boatbuilding, all over Australia and internationally

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Enrol now in a course.

See the Wooden Boat Centre program for 2012 here.

A unique wooden boat discovery centre
Alongside the school workshops is the Wooden Boat Centre Tasmania’s discovery centre, where visitors can enter the wonderful world of wooden boats – their history, their construction, their use, the tools that shape them, the peculiar names and terms for things, the atmosphere of the wooden boat workshop.

Visitors also watch the school and its students at work, and can come back again and again to see the various boats – and the skills that produce them – growing and taking shape over time.

 

Learn the craft of wooden boatbuilding		Learn about wooden boats and boatbuilding