According to Potter and Wellington, Nephi’s statement that “I had finished the ship” (1 Nephi 18:4) certainly did not mean that he built it by himself. If Alexandre Eiffel said, “I finished my tower in Paris,” it would not mean that he built it alone. Nephi does not tell us how many people worked onthe construction of his ship, only that “we did work timbers” (1 Nephi 18:1), and that at least some of the workers were his reluctant brethren (1 Nephi 17:18). [George Potter & Richard Wellington, Discovering The Lehi-Nephi Trail, Unpublished Manuscript (July 2000), p. 220]
“I Had Finished the Ship”
The Hiltons note that a 60-70 foot ship would not have been excessively large to build by hand; many of the dhows now sailing the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea are as large as 180 feet, all handmade.
They asked a shipwright how many working days would be required to build a complete 60-foot long vessel. He estimated that the four men working in his shipyard, using precut lumber on hand, could do it in five months, or a total of 600 man days. At least part of the time, Nephi had the labor of eight men in his father’s colony, and possibly some of the children. working together, they could perhaps have harvested the lumber and built such a ship in about a year. Of course, if the ship were bigger, and it could well have been, more time would have been needed.
Assuming that all the men could not be working on the boat all of the time--because of sickness, family concerns, hunting, planting, harvesting, etc.--a more likely time-span for building the ship might be two years, especially if we allow that Nephi fetched his own tresses and cut them to size. And since Nephi also had to smelt the metal to make the tools, the shipbuilding project could easily have taken even three or four years. [Lynn M. and Hope A. Hilton, Discovering Lehi, p. 164]