My example - Johnny Wray

It happened in my school days, when I was 14 or 15 years old, that I came across a wonderful book in the public library of Goes, written by New Zealander Johnny Wray. Vagabonds of the Southsea, in a Dutch translation. He described the building of a sailing boat Ngataki. Very much from scratch in the years of the Great Depression. He had been fired at the age of 21, and decided to build a sailing boat by himself.
He was allowed to do it in the front yard of his parents home Remuera Road in Auckland. He wanted to build the boat of Kauri wood, so the boat would easily survive him. Yet, he had to get the wood himself, from logs that were lost in transportation, and lay separately stranded on the beaches of Hauraki Gulf.
In a yacht of his friend, he searched the beaches, and after collecting some wrong ones, he found some sound Kauri ones, bringing in enough to start boat building. The logs were sawn, paid for by those first cheapy wrong ones.
His 'design' was a half model, carved by himself, at a ratio of 1:12, taking care it was a straightforward model to simplify the construction. He then cut the model into parts in such a way, that he could use the pieces to measure the real dimensions of the construction parts.
Having mastered all the difficulties of getting the parts of the boat together in an unconventional but sound manner, he could sail his boat with friends across the Pacific, and lived on it with his girl friend Loti. However, in an answer to a letter of mine in the late fifties, he wrote, that because of WWII he had been forced to sell Ngataki. He included a photograph of his new sailing boat he had build again, some 10 feet  larger, than his 35 foot Ngataki (Interestingly, Ngataki is being restored nowadays in New Zealand). Having read the book my decision was taken - building a boat from scratch, of my own design. However, for practical reasons it would take some time (actually half a century) to realize my plans.