Bolger Brick
Description
The Brick is a minimalist, 8-foot-4-inch plywood daysailer designed by innovative American naval architect Phil Bolger in the 1980s, conceived as an exercise in maximizing utility from exactly three 4x8-foot sheets of plywood—with zero waste. Featured in Bolger's seminal book Boats with an Open Mind (1994), it's a flat-bottomed, hard-chine sharpie catboat emphasizing radical simplicity, affordability, and portability for amateur builders. Ideal for solo pond or bay sailing, beach launching, or as a tender, it sails surprisingly well in light winds (up to 6 knots on reaches) thanks to its wide beam and balanced leg-o'-mutton rig. While visually unconventional (boxy and slab-sided), it's stable, lightweight, and forgiving—earning praise as "the ultimate no-frills fun boat" for beginners or minimalists. The design inspired the popular Puddle Duck Racer class, with dozens of Bricks built worldwide.
The standard boat dimensions
| i | - |
|---|---|
| j | - |
| p | 14.25 ft |
| e | 9 ft |
| p2 | - |
| e2 | - |
| i2 | - |
| j2 | - |
| I | J | P | E | P2 | E2 | I2 | J2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| - | - | 14.25 ft | 9 ft | - | - | - | - |
Blueprints
Sails
| Sail Type | LEG-O-MUTTON |
|---|---|
| Luff | 14.25 ft - (4343 mm) |
| Foot | 9 ft - (2743 mm) |
| Leech | 13.62 ft - (4151 mm) |
| Tack Angle | * 67.14 ° |
| Diag (clew/head) | 13.58 ft - (4139 mm) |
| Head (Inches) | 1.5 |
| Area | * 59.9 ft² |
| Comments | The sail is secured to the mast along its luff edge. The sheet is run through a hole in the sprit end (hat end is first inserted into a webbing loop at the sail's clew). A "snotter" is used to push the sprit aft and, thus, flatten the sail. |
Disclaimer. Boats are not all the same -- even when produced in the same factory of the same model. Sailrite does its best to publish accurate dimensions, but we often find it worthwhile to have our customers measure their boats carefully before we produce kits for them. You should take the same precautions, especially when the data is not from Sailrite. The information on this site is not guaranteed to be accurate. Sailrite offers this content as a service to our community, but takes no responsibility for the reliability of the data provided.