I spent the first half of the day rechecking all of my measurements and carefully documenting the changes that I’ve made from the earlier version of this kayak. None of this is particularly challenging, I’m just notoriously error prone so checking my own work takes a lot longer than it should. After a sufficient period of pacing and pondering and scribbling, I sliced up some ribs, fired up the steam box, and did some actual work.
This third set of ribs is 1/8 of an inch shorter than the last set and, at least in some parts of the kayak, represents the shortest I can possibly go and still get the ribs into the mortises. Because of this, the ribs end up being a bit less squared off than usual but that’s actually necessary for me to be able to attach the stringers in the correct location without having the curve of the rib touch the skin.
The work itself is pretty easy, just pull a rib out of the steam box, bend it a little, stick it in the mortises. Steam bending success is 99% about just having good bending wood and steaming for the right amount of time.
I usually back the first couple bends with a leather belt to prevent splitting but other than that I bend the rest freehand.
Because one end of the steam box is always a little bit hotter than the other end, I flip every other rib the opposite way when putting it into the boat so any differences in flex will balance out once the stringers are tied on.
The whole process takes about two hours from when I start cutting wood to when I finish bending, and the bend itself takes about 20 minutes. People often find ways to make this a lot more complicated, but it doesn’t need to be.
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