In the beginning...

My first step in building my own kayak was to do a little research. I read reviews of a number of books and techniques and settled on a cedar strip kayak. One of the books that a number of reviews recommended was the following which I settled on.

• Nick Schade, The Strip-Built Sea Kayak: Three Rugged, Beautiful Boats You Can Build. Camden, Maine: Ragged Mountain Press, 1998. (See Amazon)

I found the author has clear instructions.

My Previous Experience

I built a canoe previously from a kit, the Sunset from Stillwater Boats. This was a good experience although there are some problems I had which effected the look of the canoe. The kit from Stillwater was excellent but I have a feeling the marine plywood design (where you wire the pieces together) is more difficult than the cedar strip. I had problems getting the pieces to fit together perfectly and I ended up using more epoxy in places than I should have because I got paranoid about the strength. In any case, this is my previous experience and I would like to say I have no training as a woodworker and everything I know is pretty much self taught.

Building the Kayak
Now, back to the kayak. I chose to build the Guillemot which is a higher performance sea kayak but also a little more difficult to build according to the author. I chose this because I have been kayaking a long time and wanted something that could handle the water I run into off of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Maine.

First Step

This was to create the designs for the forms. One of the really nice things about this book is the author gives you the offsets for the forms and explains how you can enter the data into a spreadsheet to create a printout for the shape of the forms. I entered mine in excel as the author instructed which creates a line graph I printed out. I then transferred the design to a large sheet of graph paper (by hand drawing) which I used to cut out the forms.

• Guillemot Spreadsheet

I'm in the process of getting everything set up which include:

• mill the cedar strips (completed)
• I also put a cove and bead on each side of strips
• cut the forms (see my upcoming post for pictures)
  
• build the strong back (see my upcoming post for pictures)

I'll continue to blog this as I progress.