New member.

Hi ,welcome to the forum. I think the essential tools are pretty simple. I'm building TIki 30, and have so far tried to keep track of what tools I use most. Portable "Job-site" Table Saw with a rip fence is pretty essential for me, allowing me to cut down bigger lumber into the small strips the Tiki uses. They're about $100 at the big-box stores. Bandsaw: gets suprisingly LITTLE use, almost unneeded so far. Go for a thin-kerf hand-held Japanese Pull-saw. Electric Hand Plane, gets a fair amount of use, especially for squaring up the edges of multiple ply laminates. Electric Handheld Jigsaw: hets a LOT of use at first, cutting out parts Lots of clamps, and 2 or 3 long ones. A lot of my clamps are made if cut-up PVC water pipe, and were invaluable. Big boxes of rubber gloves, a gallon of acetone for cleaning epoxy (acetone will melt right through vinyl gloves btw) Lots of yardsticks, pencils, a big square, even a chalk-line will help Belt sanders are handy Make a bucket of short drywall screws with home-made wooden washers out of scrap 1/4 plywood for temporary tacking down of glue jobs, and a box of wooden matches to epoxy into the screw holes when the screws come back out. Before starting up, map out your space, and where stuff will go. Try for a cool shady place, not out in the sun if you can. A structure overhead that you can hang the hulls from will come in handy Measure everything multiple times before you cut wood. I'm sure there is more. Good luck!

Hi in our shop we use denatured alcohol and paper rags in box for cleaning epoxy. We also use a full range of power sanders. We have 8" and 6" DAs. We also use 4 1/2" mini-grinders.WE also have several machines that use 3" velcro disks. We have 3" DAs from SnapOn that are very compact and have a flexible backing pad that will rool up on the side of a fillet. We also have several 3" sander/grinders that use the same disks. We buy thes disks from 3M and Klingspor in the complete range from 24 grit thru 1200 grit. We use the finer grits for polishing stainless steel parts prior to buffing. We use PSA long board strips in 36, 40, and 60 grit and cut them to length as required.We use 2 3/4" wide rolls of PSA paper in the finer grits. We like 3M Imperial for the coarse grits and 3m gold for the rolls. We also use 1/4" die-grinders with flap wheels to sand fillets as well. We order 40 grit flaps from McMaster Carr. Many people use too fine a grit of sand paper to start out with. If you trying to shape or flatten something finer paper will tend to float and create a hole on either side of the spot your sanding. Change sandpaper often dull paper doesn't cut well. Just my thoughts, David http://www.boatsmithfl.com