The Kayak Project
Part 1: Introduction
One beautiful summer evening shortly after I arrived in
Seattle
I was watching the boats out on
Lake
Union
for
Duck Dodge and thought, "Wow! I would love to be out on the water! I wish I had a boat!"Â
Since I don't have the space to store a sailboat, a vehicle to pull it with, or the money to pay for a slip on the water, a kayak sounded like a good option.
That same night I looked at kayaks on craigslist and found a free kayak "in need of repair"Â This is what I picked up:
I arranged the pieces in order to get a sense of what to do next:
After that it was time for some reading:
I picked up The New Kayak Shop at the used book store down the street and learned a little about kayak design and theory. I played around with the idea of designing my own cedar strip laminated kayak and downloaded some kayak design software, but decided it would probably best to try building with the pieces I already had for my first attempt at boat building. Further research on the internet suggested that the parts I salvaged were for a skin-on-frame boat. The original kayaks built by the Inuit were made using this method by stretching animal skins over driftwood frames. Modern skin-on-frame boats use waterproofed nylon or canvas over a wood frame. I bought a book on this method at a kayak outfitter on Lake Union and later recieved a book that more closely describes my kayak which approximates the designs from Percy Blandsford in the 1960s. The next step was to build a model.
