I received this email from Greg
Hello.
I am owner of wooden finn dinghy. I’m great fan of this class, specialy wooden made.
I was wondering if is there any chance to find or buy building plans of finn dinghy somewere in internet?
Looking to hear from you.Regards
Greg
The Finn is a completely classic boat and quite radical for its day. It was designed by Rickard Sarby and was essentially a fattened up and cut off (at one end) sailing canoe hullshape. That is probably where the inspiration for the unstayed rig came from too.
Two images below – The Finn stern doctored by me.
Classic D class sailing canoe. Note the similarity in profile in particular and the bow. Those used to reading plans will see the stern is much more vee’d than the Finn. But many D class canoes have flattened sterns like the finn and more abrupt ends to the waterlines in plan rather than the more classic shape shown here.
Rickard was a champion canoe sailor and designer between the wars
Anyway … are there plans around for a building a wooden Finn?
The closest information I could find to a Finn Dinghy Plan that could be used for boatbuilding was on the Spanish Finn Class page to define the shape of the Finn which is for the making of measurement templates. Happily it defines a lot of the shape, but doesn’t quite pin down a baseline for them.
Also this page from the Classic part of the Finn website. It is labelled 1974.
PDF for measuring a Finn Dinghy – could be used as a plan?
I have just found that there is a “Classic Finn” Sailing Dinghy Class Association in the UK. It is focussed on boats built prior to 1965, but it has tuning and setup guides. Which are just fantastic for anyone wanting to recreate a classic Finn in modern timber.
If anyone knows of more complete information I would love to see it – please post it here in the Comments.
I will leave you with this slideshow of a wooden Finn restored by Australian Boatbuilder Ross Lillistone. I wrote an article here about Ross’s Finn Dinghy.
