Its been a while since I have posted a proper update on the progress of my kayak, and I’m not going to write a lot about each of the steps I have performed since my last update. If you have any questions about how I did any of the steps please leave a comment and I will answer it as well as I can. I am planning to seal the skin with clear polyurethane tomorrow, which will leave only varnishing the coaming and attacthing the deck rigging left to do before the boat is done! With a little luck I will have another big update up in a little over a week. In the meantime, please enjoy the following pictures which will bring you up to date with the current state of the project.
The completed frame with masik and deck stringers in place.
Stern breasthook in place.
Gluing the coaming together after steam bending the pieces and letting them sit for a few days.
Bow breasthood.
Late afternoon light showing off the shapes of the ribs.
It does feel a bit unfortunate to cover the frame up.
The skin pulled tight along the keelson. Its nice to see the shadows of the ribs on the cloth.
The cloth was pinned to the keel stringer first, and then pulled tight and pinned to the top of each gunwale moving from the ends to the cockpit. Here is the stern.
The skin wrapped tight to the gunwales.
A thin board with a centerline was clamped to the middle of the deck frames and used as a work surface to hold the cloth in place while sewing. Two needles were used at once, so that each end of the line was passed in opposite directions through each stitch hole. I was really pleased with how the seam resulted, while it was not a quick process.
The coaming held in place with finish nails.
Sewing the coaming to the skin. The coaming is not directly attached to frame in any way.
The kayak with skin wetted out to shrink it. As you can see, the skin loosened up while wet.
When the skin dried, almost all of the wrinkles dissapeared as the skin tightened. The only remaining wrinkles are in small areas between the coaming and the cockpit rim, which I am not concerned with. It looks great.
This is a bit last minute, but for those of you who are local, I will be displaying the completed frame of the kayak I have been working on as well as my cedar strip canoe at the Wooden Boat Festival being hosted by the Willamette Sailing Club on July 10th. The show will go from noon until 6pm. You will be able to find me hanging out with the other experts( check the event poster: their words, not mine) who are RiversWest members. More information can be found here. I will hope to see you there!
PLEASE NOTE: I am publishing this post unfinished because I will be out of town for a week and unable to work on it while away. I will clean up the writing and add some more when I return. Until then, please enjoy the pictures.
Its been a busy couple of weeks since I got the ribs in and my skin on frame kayak is really taking shape. I am also pleased to be able to say that I think there will be enough room for my feet. With the ribs and keel stringer installed, I put it on the ground and shuffled my feet forward against the deck frame which doubles as a foot rest and found that my heels fit nicely between the ribs, while my toes did not go so far above the deck frame as I had worried they might. With that being said, allow me to outline the steps I have completed.
The ribs have all been pegged into place with 1/8th inch dowels, but there were some final touches to be completed before final installation. All the ribs were sanded smooth and corners rounded over, particularly near where my feet will go and where I will sit for comfort. With the ribs sanded, I placed the keel stringer across the top of the ribs to see which ones needed to be trimmed. I trimmed the ends of the ribs that sat high to allow the stringer to follow a more natural curve, while also anticipating that a certain amount of shimming would be done when the stinger would be installed. When I was happy with how the stringer curved over the ribs, I drilled through the outside of the gunwale and through the rib but without going through the inside of the gunwale. The dowels were inserted without glue, and when the skin is installed, it will prevent the dowels from coming out.
With the ribs installed, I started working on fitting and shaping the stems. I used the the simple method discussed in the Cunningham book for making a pattern and fitting the gunnwales to the stems on each end of the boat, and it worked quickly and accurately for me. With the keel stringer clamped in place but slightly off of center, I flexed it into the profile I wanted it to follow at each end and traced its inner edge on the side of the stem. I cut the stems to follow that profile, and then had to figure out the profile for the front and back of the boat. I drew multiple lines, cut profiles which I knew would be more generous than I would want in the end, mulled things over and cut the final profiles. I think I am happy with how they turned out, but I suppose I wont really know until I get the boat out on the water. At some point I just decided to commit to it. With a few adjustments to ensure that the stems sat perpendicular to the width of the boat, I lashed them in place using the lashing method used in the Morris book.
After putting the first coaming around my body and also on the boat I decided it was too large. I have since bent a narrower cockpit coaming which I think will look much better and should also work better while rolling.
Long story short, I got the deck beam lashings in and the ribs steam bent into place. This update will be a bit long, as its been a while since I have written an update on this project, but if you don’t check anything else out, check out the video of me bending a rib into place. Steam bending may be one of my new favorite things to do.
About a month and a half ago I finished lashing the deck beams to the gunwales, and would have liked to start working on cutting rib stock down to size, but I don’t have any green oak yet. The Cunningham book in particular recommends procuring a source of green bending stock early on, but I didn’t think the project would proceed so quickly, so the need for it snuck up on me.
Sure enough the oak was harder to find than I expected. I e-mailed some of the local folks who build greenland kayaks and some of whom teach classes building them to see if I could buy some from them, and they did not have enough to sell me any. I e-mailed a family friend with a sustainable forestry project, and he did not have any, but he was able to recommend another family run mill outside of Salem which might have some wood. Sure enough, I called the guy and it sounded like he had a lot of material in stock. Unfortunately, its a long enough drive that I wasn’t able to get down there until a few weeks later.
Getting down there was its own little adventure. It was down highways and side roads I don’t know, and pretty soon I came to the “pavement ends” sign. And that was before I had even reached the driveway to this place. I got to the red mailbox he had described and realised it was probably red more due to rust than to any paint. I found the place most of 2 miles down a gravel road which rolled up, down and around the rolling hills west of Salem. The first thing that really took my notice when I parked was the large timber framed barn which houses all the oak which is being prepared for the two kilns. Ben Deumling, the owner of the forest and mill told me the frame of the building is entirely put together without metal. All pins, mortises and tenons. Ben was very helpful, helping me find the boards I needed and selling them to me at a very reasonable price. He also said that with a little lead time, he would gladly specially saw boards in dimensions and grain orientations that I or other boatbuilders might need. Pretty cool. If you find yourself needing oak for flooring or boatbuilding, check them out: Zena Forest Products.
A couple weeks ago I got the rib stock planed down to thickness and jointed on one edge at my old high school woodshop. I cut the boards into the strips that would become ribs at home. Figuring out the length of the ribs out was a bit of a process. For the ribs I am using the methods discussed in the Cunningham book. The book talks about using the measurement across your fingers with your hands held flat and your index fingers touching. It talks about using a the length you would measure closer to your finger tips for a lower volume kayak and the longer measurement towards your palms for a higher volume boat with more freeboard. This all seemed fine except that I also had to take into account the fact that my gunwales are wider than the ones discussed in the book. After much debate the compromise I settled on was adding 6 inches to the length at the bow and 2/5 of that length at the stern. This takes into account the width at the base of my fingers at about 7 inches and a 1 inch decrease in length for the depth of the gunwales.
With this dimension figured out, I had to make the rib length gauge. Each rib has a certain amount of material added to the width of the bottom of the gunnels at its set of mortises. The rib gauge provides these distances, starting with the full measurement of 6 inches at the bow and tapering to two fifths of that length at the stern. Between these two lengths, 24 equal increments need to be created so that each of the 25 ribs would receive its own unique length. The Cunningham book has an elegant method for creating these increments without complicated decimals or fractions. Without going into the method here, suffice it to say it was fairly quick and elegant.
With the gauge created I started going through my rib stock to find the best long sections of high quality oak, and started cutting ribs to length, starting at the middle and moving towards each end. This process went very quickly and it was satisfying to start working on significant parts of the boat again. With all the ribs cut to length, I used my tablesaw to cut a sixteenth of an inch off of the thickness of what would be the inside of the ribs for the last 6 inches of their length. Thinning the ends allows the location of curves in the ribs to be focused more towards the gunwales. The transitions from thicker to thinner portions of the ribs were smoothed with a 4 in 1 rasp with blocks held under the ends to act as height guides. Ribs were sanded before being soaked and steamed, though since the combination of soaking and steaming raises the grain and makes the wood feel rough, I would skip sanding before steaming in the future. When I was almost ready to steam the ribs, I put the ribs into water to soak for 24 hours.
While I was getting the ribs ready to bend I was also working on the apparatus I would use for steaming them, and I approached this process with the goal of spending the least amount of money possible. I was able to create the whole assembly for less than $15, so I feel it was a success. For the boiler I bought an old 4 liter pot from a local thrift shop. To transport the steam from the pot to the chamber I bought a threaded barb fitting and 4 feet of 5/8 inch radiator hose. The steam box I made from rigid foam insulation I was able to get for free. I taped the insulation together with duct tape and put a few dowels in it to hold the ribs off the bottom of the chamber. I used a candy thermometer from the kitchen to monitor the temperature within the chamber. I used part of an old t-shirt as the door to the chamber.
With the apparatus ready and the ribs soaked, I was ready to steam them into place. I clamped my bending jig to a work table near the steam chamber. I filled the pot most of the way up with water, and put it on my MSR Whisperlite stove. I waited and watched the temperature gauge. It struck me how long it took to see any change in the temperature within the chamber. When the temperature finally did begin to increase it did so quickly, but it stopped increasing at a lower temperature than I wanted. I raised the height of the steam chamber so the hose would follow a straighter path from the pot and that seemed to allow the steam to flow more easily. The thermometer did not indicate as high a temperature as I would have liked, but seemed high enough to begin.
I put the first 4 ribs in and started my stopwatch. After about 12 minutes I pulled the first one out and gently bent one end with the bending jig, turned it around and bent the other end. I walked over to the boat, slotted the end closer to me into its mortise and gently bent it down to slot the other end in. It went in easily without any drama. I continued and was able to get all but two of the ribs into place. Two of the ribs with the tightest bends broke as I tried to slot the second side in. Throughout the process adjustments were made to how the ribs were bent. They stayed pliable for several minutes after they had been put in. I had Joseph’s help with this aspect of the process and it was very helpful to have someones help so one person could sight along the length of the boat and call out instructions while the other made adjustments.
A few days later I made three replacements for each rib to allow for multiple breakages. I broke one rib before I was able to successfully bend one into one position, and the other rib went in first try.
The steam bending was great fun. Its really incredible to make oak do things it just doesn’t seem like it should be able to do. I have already gotten started on the next steps which seem like they will go quickly and be satisfying as the silhouette of the boat really takes shape. Stay tuned, I will try and additional updates up soon as the next steps proceed.
Though progress on my kayak has been slow, I did take another class at RiversWest two weeks ago, this time in paddle making. One of the options was to make a greenland style paddle, which I have almost finished. I made it with some tight grained fir I had laying around. It currently weights just under 37 ounces, so its not a particularly light weight paddle, but it does feel nice in the hands and if nothing else I’m sure it will be a very strong spare paddle. I carved it according to the instructions on the Qajaq USA website by Chuck Holst.
I cut the length and flat profile first. Next the flat tapers of the blade were cut. For me it was fastest to cut the tapers mostly with my slick, and to then clean them up with a hand held power planer. I left the shoulders of the blades well defined and also gave the ends of the blades a blunter profile than the instructions show. We will see how I like that. At the shoulders of the blades I cut a slight hollow between where the shaft begins tapering and the edges of the blade. I used a gutter plane I found at a garage sale to establish that hollow. The shapes were refined and the paddle was smoothed with a random orbit sander, and I used an interface pad for much of the sanding to help the sander conform to all of the curves better. I am finishing it with linseed oil. Please forgive the low quality of the photograph, I will replace it with a better one when I have time.
I used it over the weekend of the 7th and 8th while Emily and I did a single night canoe trip in the Willamette. I was in Gertie, the six hour canoe, and I’ve got to say I get the impression that Greenland style paddles do not seem well suited to boat with such high gunwales or such a wide beam. That aside, it still seemed to perform reasonably given the circumstances and I look forward to using it in my kayak when it is finished.
This is a project I actually finished during the fall, and had not gotten around to posting until now. This was my first real experience with leather work, so I was not entirely sure what to expect, but it seems to have gone well and I am happy with the results. Here is how the process went.
The first step was to create a pattern Which would have enough leather to wrap around the knife handle and blade. I was getting bits of advise from a book called Knifemaking by Bo Bergman. It seems like a bit of a goofy book to me, since it actually doesn’t talk about making the blade at all, but is really just about making the handle and sheaths, but it does have lots of good information on those subjects. One of the sheaths presented in the book had the leather seem forming a spine down one side of the blade and handle, so I used that model as the starting point. I drew the silhouette of the knife and then added width on each side of the silhouette so that the leather would reach around to the center of the opposite side of the knife. I then added a little extra width on each side of the resulting shape to provide the extra material for the sewn spine and for the clamps to have plenty of material to hold onto. I think this step may be easier to see in pictures than to hear described. You can see the silhouette with extra width added drawn on the piece of paper to the right of the knife.
Next, I traced the pattern on the piece of leather and cut it out with a scalpel. My girlfriend keeps scalpels around which are surgical quality, but not sterile for bookbinding, and I have to say that they are awesome to use. Much sharper than any X-acto knife I have used.
To mold the knife around the knife, I first had to protect the knife from the moisture. I coated all exposed metal with some grease I have laying around for bike parts, and then wrapped a few layers of plastic wrap around the whole thing. To make the leather supple, I soaked it in warm water for about 15 minutes. A combination of small spring clamps and c-clamps with wood pads were used to hold the leather snugly around the knife. It took some work to get the leather pulled as snug as I wanted, but it was pretty simple to clamp parts of the sheath while working to get other parts more snug, and then cycling back around until the leather had formed around the knife to my liking, and so that the spine followed a path I liked. I left the sheath clamped up like this for 3 day so that the leather could fully dry and take on the shape of the knife.
After molding the body of the sheath I cut and molded another piece around the sheath around the handle of the knife. I decided to add this piece so that I could cut a channel in the body of the sheath for the sharp edge of the blade to pass through while pulling the knife out or putting it back in. This piece was also cut to have the belt loop.
After allowing the second piece of leather to dry for several days, it was time to begin sewing. The sewing required consideration to figure out a procedure which would work best. Regardless of which order I sewed pieces in, there would be some part that would be difficult. I believe the order I came up with was the optimal one. The first seam I sewed was the spine. I used a single piece of thread for sewing across the tip all the way to the opening of the sheath. I had two needles going at once, so each end of the piece of thread went through each hole. After sewing the spine I sewed the part around the handle on. To sew each side of that I first drilled the holes with a 1/16th inch drill bit, and I then cut the needles short so I would be able to maneuver them inside the sheath. Like the spine, I had two needles going at once. I also used additional needles to keep everything aligned correctly. Pushing the needles in was easy, turning them around and pushing them back out was difficult, but I got a system down which made it go reasonably smoothly. I used needle nosed pliers on the inside to hold the needle and then put a needle in the same hole that I was about to go out of, just far enough in to see the tip and give myself something to aim the needle on the inside of the sheath at. I would gradually pull the needle on the outside back out of the hole while working the needle on the inside into it. With the predrilled holes, this process went well. I imagine it would have gone poorly without drilling.
To finish it off I rubbed a little Obenauf’s leather preservative into the leather to slightly darken and protect it a bit from staining or water damage, but otherwise left it its natural color. The knife fits snugly in the sheath, and I am pleased with how it looks. It feels like I should be able to get a lifetime of use out of it.
One of the most fun aspects of the process building my Greenland kayak so far is that each step, while taking a relatively short amount of time, has created profound changes to how the boat looks. With just a few weeks of intermittent work, I have a frame which is beginning to look like a kayak. Here are the steps I completed taking up where the last post left off.
The ends of the gunwales have been fitted to each other by repeatedly cutting a kerf where the two meet. I cut the mating surface back until the surface was an inch tall at the tips of the gunwales. The bow was then pegged with three dowels that were wedged at each end. A string was then strung from one end of the boat to the other, and its location was measured at each of the braces to make sure the boat was straight. Adjustments were made as needed, and the stern was pegged.
Over the weekend I cut and fitted all of the flat deck frames. Most are 1×2 pine, while I made the frame which will double as a foot brace, and the two frames immediately behind the cockpit slightly wider. I traced out the shape of the two raised frames according to the instructions in the Cunningham book, and fitted them. I used a basic jig to clamp the frames in place while drilling them. Most frames received two dowels in each end while the ones which will take more stress received three in each end. Please note that there is one deck beam left to be installed, which is called the masik. It will double as a sort of knee/ thigh brace and I will fit that once I have the ribs and stringers installed, so I can get the fit just right.
Once the frames were installed, it was time to lash the ends in place. I drilled some holes near the temporary braces at each end, cut groves from the holes to the bottom of the gunwales for the lashings to sit in, and cut some long pieces of artificial sinew. I lashed the gunwales according to the instructions in the Morris book. With the ends lashed I removed all the braces except the middle one. Currently I am planning on keeping the middle brace in place until I have the ribs installed. Next step, I will be lashing the individual frames in to strengthen and tighten the structure up.
The next boat is taking shape! Despite the lack of updates on this project, good progress has been made on my Greenland kayak over the last few weeks. Even this update is somewhat tardy.
I squared up all 50 of the mortises, which was a very gratifying process. It was the sort of work I could just turn the music on for and set myself into a rhythm. With the mortises already drilled out, cutting them square went quickly.
Next, I got a little help from Emily holding a batten in place while I drew the curves in the top of the ends of the gunwales. The curves are supposed to allow the shear line to follow a continuous concave curve from bow to stern despite the hollows in the shape of the gunwales at the ends of the boat. The curves were cut with a combination of a slick and a block plane. The slick can be seen on the bench, and is one I made according to the instructions laid out by Harry Bryan in Wooden Boat issue 205.
I made the temporary braces to spring the gunwales into shape, and began determining the shape of the boat. The assembly started by placing the gunwales in the central brace. I then used a strap to keep the bow from spreading apart while I added the brace to pinch the stern together. I was then able to add the brace to pinch the bow together. After the end braces were slid amidships enough to create a slight hollow in each end, I added the last two spreading braces in front of and behind the midships brace.
With the braces roughly in place, the quest was under way to achieve just the right curve. Slight adjustments of each brace changed the shape of the boat in surprising ways, and without having built one before, it was hard to know just what the right curves would be, or whether I might be adding too much or too little volume to the front or rear of the boat. I read through all of the guidelines presented in both books and adjusted things to a curve that looks right to me. I guess we’ll see how it works!
*This posting gets me up to date with where I was at the beginning of the weekend that just ended. Lots of good progress was made over the weekend, updates are come soon!
As a builder of small boats using a garage as my shop, my collection has started getting to the point where it takes up a considerable amount of my work space. I reached the point with the completion of Gertie where I could not start the next project in earnest until a more permanent place for Gertie could be found. With the initial shaping of the gunnels for my greenland kayak coming along, the need became more urgent. I finally talked to the landlord, bought a stud finder, and here is the result.
I made two simple cleats out of some scrap wood and screwed some eye bolts into a joist in the ceiling and the large beam across the ceiling of my shop. I used scrap wood spreaders to keep the webbing loops from pressing the gunwales inwards where there are no thwarts to support them. The result may not be the most elegant solution, as the setup currently requires someone to help lift the boat up while the other opperates the lines due to the lack of mechanical advantage in the system and the amount of friction, but it seems functional.
In the future I may add some pulleys so that boats could be lifted or lowered by a single person. At some point I will also move the cleats further apart. I don’t know what I was thinking placing them so close together.
After a few weeks without much progress, work has resumed on the Coho. The deck has been sanded smooth. The boat looks strangely naked with the deck sanded out, which I suppose it should given that the hatches haven’t been cut out, the coaming hasn’t been installed and there are no deck lines on it.
The deck was flipped over to work in its underside. Reinforcement pieces have been epoxied in just in front of the cockpit, and Joseph also added some more epoxy to the seams around the triangular piece behind the cockpit.
