Safety
Working with many of these materials can be hazardous to your long term health. Various sorts of fine wood dust have been shown to be bad for you. Fibreglass dust and epoxy dust do nothing good. The fumes from the curing epoxy are nasty. The catalyst used for the epoxy can be absorbed into your blood stream.
What this all means is that there are two items that should be at the top of the list: a respirator and latex gloves. The respirator should be rated for organic fumes as opposed to the standard respirator that is meant mainly to stop dust. Disposable latex gloves are handy for party tricks but also prevent ninety percent of the mess with epoxy work. If you can't use latex go for vinyl gloves.
I've gone through two respirators and somewhere around a thousand latex gloves in the last two years.
Hand Tools
You really need very little for boat building. A good hand plane, a hand saw, and sandpaper round out the list. If I didn't have an electric stapler I could have used a manual stapler, like those used in housing construction.
Power Tools
You can do almost all of the jobs by hand but power tools make the boring jobs go quicker. The most useful one by far has been the random orbital sander.
The tools that live in the floor space of the garage, where I work, include:
- a random orbital sander
- a circular saw
- a router
- a jigsaw
- an electric stapler
- an air compressor (see "Vacuum Bagging")
I own portable tools because there is no permanent shop. If I did have permanent shop space, a table saw would be at the top of the list.