experiences

We have got nice greetings from the US. The first VENDIA planks ever were shipped to the USA on September, 2018. 


Steve from Blue Hill, Maine has taken a big challenge and is building Sjogin IIIa, a seaworthy daysailer. The first VENDIA planks are now on and Steve has been very pleased with VENDIA and the quality of it. Planks plane like real wood, bend fine and smell good too, Steve says.

Former lawyer, Ewan from Scotland found that running his own law firm for about forty years was quite stressful way of life and working with wood was a good way of switching off. Ewan had built his first boat in 1986 and now he is building his eighth boat, Kotik. Kotik is a boat model designed by Iain Oughtred and a stretched version of his Wee Seal. It’s a small double-ended cruising yacht with a gaff rig. “I will also install a stove to keep warm in harbour”, says Ewan. He has built different boats in every few years but the favourite is always the one you are building just now.

Impregnation of wooden boat is important to guarantee the decay resistance and longevity. We have made an absorption test of impregnating agents to see how VENDIA marine plank reacts with different impregnating agents. The test was made in accordance with Cobb-test, in which the impregnating agents were absorbed 168 hours (seven days) into the test materials. The test materials were normal structured 9 mm VENDIA (called evo1 in the pictures), 9 mm VENDIA Pro (called evo2 in the pictures) and birch plywood.

Canadian-born boatbuilder Jorma Hangas fiddled VENDIA marine plank on VENDIA´s presentation stand in Sulkava Rowing Race on July 2014 and he said: “Oh, I wish this had been invented 45 years ago!” The owner of the Finnish boatyard Juvan Veneveistämö Ky Jorma Hangas started to build wooden boats in 1966 and since then he has been building numerous wooden boats for customers in Finland, Nordic countries and Germany. At best, he has built 30 boats per year. To this day he has built altogether honourable number of approximately 1000 boats.