Silhouette (boat)
sailboat class
The Silhouette also called the Silhouette 17, is a recreational keelboat that was designed by Robert Tucker and first built in 1954.
The basic Silhouette 17 design was developed through five marks and produced for more than 30 years.
Production
Originally made available as a kit for amateur construction from plywood, later kits and finished boats were supplied by Hurley Marine in Plymouth, United Kingdom and later by Varne Marine, among other builders. Production ran between 1954 and 1986, with about 3,000 boats of all marks completed.
After drawings were published in The Rudder magazine in April 1955, some readers noted the boat's outline shape or silhouette and the boat got its name.
Design
The Silhouette 17 is a recreational keelboat, with the early models built predominantly of plywood and later ones from glassfibre, with wood trim. Boats built up until 1960 had a fractional sloop and after that, during Mk II production, switched to a masthead sloop rig. The hull has a spooned, raked stem; a raised counter, angled transom; an internally mounted spade-type rudder controlled by a tiller and twin keels or a single fixed fin keel. All versions had complex sheer lines, producing a distinctive appearance. The displacement and ballast vary by model.
The public source identifies “Silhouette (boat)” as sailboat class. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Silhouette, boat and sailboat.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q85801171. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1954, 1986, 1955 and 1960.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Silhouette (boat)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.