Customer participation

At the bottom of this page, you will find a calculator for calculating your savings.

If you choose to come as a small group you will naturally complete more tasks within the same time-frame, but no more than two persons per boat at a time is possible in the workshop, otherwise you will just be in each others way.

Of course you will need a place to stay for your time with us. We will assist you in finding accommodation, at lower prices than you would normally find as a "common" foreign tourist.

We are one of the very few boat-builders who invite our customers to participate in building their own boat in our workshop in Sicily, in an organized and systematic way.

There are great price savings for you to be made by taking on some of the tasks of building your boat in our well-equipped workshop, thereby reducing our needed hours. How much you save will depend on how long you stay, and how hard you work. Your only added expense will be a few hours per week of tuition/instruction fees, and rent for workshop and tools.

Many aspiring boat-builders consider building a boat in their own home, there are now available CNC-cut kits of plywood (also for "Ilur"), which can save time by having pre-cut parts, and also in this way getting by with only hand tools for assembly. But there is still a lot of work to be done, some of it complicated, and materials to be sourced. These kits are very exact, but not cheap. So you do not save a lot of money this way, but you will have the enjoyment of a rewarding hobby and the satisfaction and pride of having built a nice boat all by yourself.

Unless you are an experienced amateur or professional boat-builder, home-building has a lot of hurdles to overcome, that must be considered:

• Sourcing materials and equipment is a time-consuming and not always an easy process. Also, do you really know what you need and how to judge the quality of what you find?

• As a single boat amateur project, you will not get the best price quotes for what you buy.

• Not having a fully equipped workshop with machines and tools, may be only having the most basic hand tools, each task will take you much longer to complete. The extra tools and equipment you have to buy or rent is an added cost to your boat.

• Without readily available templates and patterns for the different parts of your boat, time and costs are added to make these.

• Numerous hours will be spent in your workshop's "moaning chair" on figuring out the next procedure or contemplating mistakes you have made (believe it - mistakes will be made!), and how to fix them.

• Do you have the necessary space to comfortably work on your boat project - space for the boat with enough space around it to work, a workbench, tools and storage for your materials and parts?

• Can your workshop be heated to the needed temperatures for epoxy, glues and paint?

• Do you readily have helping hands available for tasks difficult for one person alone to perform, like handling awkward size parts or time-critical tasks like limited usable time for two-component glues and paints etc.?

Many home-builders spend a lot longer time than anticipated, many amateurs spend years in completing their boat.

Building in co-operation with us in our workshop does away with most of these handicaps, and has added advantages:

• You arrive at a complete, fully equipped workshop

• Plans and drawings for your boat are already in place.

• Building platform (strongback), jigs, moulds and patterns are ready

• Materials are pre-cut and dimensioned

• Qualified tuition, problem solving and help is always available right there

• Our team, which you will be part of, will share your entusiasm of a task well done and re-motivate you if screw-ups occur. This is important to keep your enthusiasm going.

• Your boat will be completed much quicker, even if you do not have the time available to participate in the whole process.

As an example, our signature model, the "Ilur" takes 450 to 600 hours to complete by our qualified craftsmen (depending on chosen sail rig and accessories), with materials and moulds in place, pre-cut and dimensioned. This means that to participate in all the processes of building your boat, you would need to be with us for 11 to 14 weeks. But if this length of stay is not possible for you, even a few weeks will be beneficial. Check out our page "The building process" to find what parts of the building process you prioritize

This is how it works:

1. You decide on your available length of stay with us, and how many hours per week you would like to work (You might also like to have some time off to enjoy our surroundings here in bella Sicilia).

2. Together you and we find out how much of the building process - and which parts of it - you like to participate in, based on your working hours available, your previous experience and our estimated building time for the whole boat. We then decide together which tasks you will perform, and what is left for us to do. The only tasks we will not leave for you to perform will be ones involving potential dangerous machinery for untrained persons, like cutting and dimensioning timber. This is for safety reasons and our responsibility for injuries.

3. We have already in advance mapped the estimated time you should need for each task in detail, taking your previous experience and thereby efficiency into account.

4. Each week we evaluate the tasks completed in the past week: if you are ahead of schedule you might like to take over more tasks from us (more final price savings). If you are behind, what to do: Work "overtime hours" to catch up? Leave more tasks to us? Prolong your stay (subject to our bookings schedule)? Complete some final tasks yourself after bringing the boat home (for instance painting/varnishing and attaching fittings)?

In this way we ensure that your boat will be completed within the planned time. Good for you - good for us for determining vacant slots for new bookings.

The price reduction you acheive by your participation will be calculated into the final settlement of your account with us, after summing up the tasks you have taken off our hands in practice.

The crew at an operation not unlike what we are trying to acheive, The Wooden Boat Centre in Tasmania, consisting of staff, volunteers and students.