Preserving & Repairing Antique & Classic Wood Boats
Arriving in 1970 to begin our teaching careers and grow our family, my wife and I bought four acres and a dilapidated circa 1826 house in Addison, Vermont. Putting four sheep on the land offered the “perfect” solution for keeping it open. Well, four soon became 30, all of whom were trying to eke an existence on way too little land.
The solution was obvious: Buy land and build our own place, which we did, and in October 1976, we moved into our new colonial saltbox sitting on 93 acres of land. We cleared the land, built a barn and figured we were all set.
The sheep had other ideas. Those thirty-odd sheep did what comes naturally, and before our eyes, the flock doubled and then doubled again.
In 1979 we built the 42′x80′ barn that now houses Snake Mountain Boatworks. By 1990, with our lives moving in other directions, the flock was sold and those barns stood empty until 2009, when what would become Snake Mountain Boatworks began rising out of the big barn’s dirt floor. The sheep, hay, and all else that farming means have been replaced by an addition, 5,000 square feet of superb wooden boat preservation space and an even larger storage facility.
The fellows who helped me turn the sheep barn into a state-of-the-art boat shop transformed themselves in the process and now comprise the crew’s nucleus. We have schooled ourselves in the ways and methods championed by Don Danenberg. The copy of “The Complete Wooden Runabout Restoration Guide” that we keep in the shop grows more dog-eared daily.
Like Danenberg Boatworks, we uphold the highest standards of craftsmanship and originality, which involves painstaking attention to every detail, using nothing but the highest quality tools and materials, never cutting a corner, and never being satisfied with good enough.
Robert Henkel and his crew at Peter Henkel Inc., Marine City, MI (www.chris-craft-parts.com) do all of our engine preservation and rebuild work, and is the go-to source of critical parts, as they have for customers globally since 1972.
Shauna Whiting, who bought the business from founder, Dale Kocian, and her Kocian Instruments team in Forest Lake, MI (www.kocianinstruments.com), executes all of our gauge and instrument preservations at the highest level of craftsmanship.
Entrust your boat to the Snake Mountain Boatworks team in complete confidence. We will deliver at a level our competition cannot touch.