Kayaks You Can Build: An Illustrated Guide to Plywood Construction - Hardcover

Moores, Ted; Rossel, Greg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1552978613 ISBN 13: 9781552978610

Publisher: Firefly Books, 2004

Synopsis

The definitive handbook for kayak builders.

Kayaks are growing in popularity as a fun, low-impact way to explore the wilderness or paddle on local waters.

Combining easy-to-follow instructions with 472 color photographs, Kayaks You Can Build takes the reader, step-by-step, through the entire construction cycle of building a plywood kayak.

This simple construction process demands neither special skills nor a woodworking shop.

This book includes:

• A short history of the kayak
• How to choose the right kayak for your needs and skill level
• Setting up your work area and how to build a work table and cradle forms
• Details of all the necessary tools, materials and supplies
• Tricks of the trade from ensuring the boat stays twist-free during construction to laying fiberglass cloth the easy way for a great finish
• Minimizing exposure to toxic fumes and dust
• How to avoid and correct mistakes.

This book includes day-to-day building journals for the three most popular kayak kits. A typical stitch and glue kayak kit contains pre-cut plywood planks, epoxy and hardware.

Drawing on more than thirty years of boatbuilding and teaching experience, Kayaks You Can Build enables the first-time builder to assemble a kayak with truly professional results.

About this title

About the Author

Ted Moores is the bestselling author of Canoecraft. In 1972, Moores pioneered the woodstrip/epoxy boatbuilding system for canoes and, since then, has promoted the fine art of wooden-canoe and kayak construction.

Greg Rössel builds and repairs small wooden boats and is an instructor at the Wooden Boat School in Maine. Rössel is the author of Building Small Boats.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

The dramatic growth in the popularity of kayaks is perhaps not surprising in a world of pricey, obnoxiously loud personal watercraft. As a low-impact way to explore wilderness or to paddle through cottage country, these elegant, easy-to-transport craft are hard to beat.

The availability of kits with precut plywood components has given a growing number of paddlers the freedom to build a strong, lightweight kayak to their specifications and at a reasonable price. The common building methods used are "stitch and glue" or "tack and tape." A typical stitch-and-glue kayak kit contains precut plywood planks, epoxy and hardware. To assemble the hull, holes are drilled along each plank's edge and the plank is temporarily wired, or stitched, to the adjoining plank. The seams are then glued and covered with epoxy and fiberglass cloth. This simple construction process demands neither special skills nor a woodworking shop. All that is necessary is the desire to build it right.

Since its roots can be traced to backyard boatbuilding, it's not surprising that using plywood to build a kayak encourages experimentation and innovation. There are many good ways to use the material, and Kayaks You Can Build is intended to be a resource for all builders, regardless of the method they have chosen to build their boat. Much of the book is dedicated to showing you how to perform each of the construction steps in an efficient and safe manner. The three featured kayaks illustrate the many different possibilities for combining the basic building techniques. Following these instructions will enable you to build a beautiful, professional-quality kayak in your first attempt.

As professional boatbuilders and teachers, we understand the challenges faced by the first-time builder and have tried to address these by demonstrating that professional quality combines a state of mind and a few shortcuts applied in the right places; by introducing simple boatbuilding controls that will make the shape of your craft predictable; by reducing exposure time to epoxy and dust to a minimum by finding the shortest route to the best results; and by exploring enough of the "why" behind what we are doing to make the instructions valuable to anyone building a plywood boat, regardless of the method.

Some independent-minded builders feel restricted by the prosaic constraints of working with a manufacturer's manual. There is always a temptation to skip steps, to do them out of order or to give more tedious tasks a lick and a promise so that you can get to the good parts. This is bad news in boatbuilding because the process is a continuum, with each new piece dependent on the placement and quality of the previous one. We'll tell you the reasons why certain steps are important and which steps in the process can be streamlined.

That said, you will make mistakes. The trick is to keep those miscues to a minimum and ensure that any repairs are top quality. Unfortunately, few stock manuals have the space to help novices correct mistakes or, better yet, avoid them. Well, mistakes do happen and we document some common ones, how they were remedied and how they could have been avoided in the first place.

The techniques and tools suggested in this book are tried and true and a great place to start, but they are not the only way. A big part of boatbuilding is problem-solving, invention, borrowing technology from one application and using it in another, and utilizing the tools and solutions you are familiar with. So sharpen up that block plane and you'll be out on the water before you know it.

Edition details

• Publisher: Firefly Books
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1552978613
• ISBN 13: 9781552978610
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256