My boat's really come together, with a mixture of muscle power, skill, and luck. I couldn't be more pleased with how well it's gone. Here's my kayak:
Now that I have the pai attached, I really don't have much wood working left to do. I started adding sealant, after these pictures. The Cedar doesn't really need it, but the marine plywood does.
What do you all suggest for names? `Qayaqa,` while accurate, lacks... something.
4 comments:
Cool! Are you gonna put up an instructional post with in-process pics? That'd be cool.
Oh, geeze. I'd love to, but I'm stumbling through it myself. I've made a lot of mistakes on this, and it'd be bad to pass those on. I'm definitely going to build another, using all the new things I've learnt. Maybe for the next one...
KC, no way! I didn't know it was a kayak - I'm working on an Aleutian style one this winter myself, I just go the lumber in on the barge from Seattle. The only clear, knot-free wood I could get in 16 foot lengths was red oak, so my frame will weigh probably 55 pounds instead of the 35 pounds it could have weighed with pine or spruce. Around these parts, Wolfgang Brinck's book is considered a great start. I got enough oak to build three kayaks because i figure my first on will be a learning experience, the second one will be decent and the third will be exactly what I want. Unfortunately, out here you haven't properly built a kayak until you do it historically correct - with hand tools, from driftwood . . . . . they are somewhat flexible on the cover being seal hide . . . .
Steve: Heh. Well, luckily, I'm not concerned about impressing anyone with `historical accuracy,` so I get to use a few screws here and there. ;) Sure, that's not how we might have make it long ago, but Plywood is only a hundred years old or so, cordless drills and computers are even newer! I'm keeping at least the last two! :p
I'm not going out of a book. I saw some old drawings and I thought `I could probably make that.` So I'm mostly winging it, though I used a few numbers from a guy named Tom Yost for some of my offsets (though I mucked around with them to fit my own wants). Luckily, I can talk to folks and pick their brain about what they'd think, and that's given me direction. I think the older style is better, because you don't have to worry about the plywood laminating over time.
What you could do, if you can't get long runs of good wood, is since you only need to do the gunwales if you're doing the ribbed style, you can scarfjoint two lesser lengths together. I know a guy who couldn't get long enough runs for the gunwales on his open top boat, and he ended up using four shorter lengths scarfed. Like that, your gunwales are thicker to begin with, so you've got more margin of error with your scarfjoint, but I think you could wing the same with three quarters to an inch and a quarter thick wood.
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