Building Notes | Cape Falcon Kayak

West Greenland kayak build: Setting up the deck and measuring the sheer

September 2021August 2022Leave a comment

I started yesterday by setting deck up according to my existing plan set and then scaling from the drawing and building a whole new set of spreader forms. There were definitely some differences between the two but it’s been about 12 years since my initial replica and I can’t remember if those were actual...

West Greenland kayak build: Laying out and mortising the gunwales

September 2021August 2022Leave a comment

A little bit of progress on the West Greenland Kayak re-design. As usual most of what I do here is just staring at things like a bewildered monkey trying to anticipate and avoid all the ways I might be backing myself into a corner. This never actually works, but squinting at measuring devices and...

Acid dye color test results

September 2021July 2023Leave a comment

The results are finally in from the color test we’ve been working on since the beginning of the year. We made two color palettes, one with acid dye and the other one with rare earth pigment, and exposed them to summer sunlight for 100 days to quantify the effects of UV exposure on each...

Slogging through the less glamorous side of what we do

August 2021July 2023Leave a comment

Haven’t been posting much lately because we’re just slogging through the less glamorous side of what we do here: filling orders, re-shooting videos etc. Here’s a few pics from a couple of F1 frames that I knocked out a couple weeks ago for a student who wanted to build a boat but didn’t have...

Video: Bending a replacement rib into an F1 frame

July 2021September 2022Leave a comment

For this latest rib bending video I took a different approach, I started off rusty, having not bent a kayak in about six months, and used some old, dried out rib stock. The idea here was to mimic the student experience where I would end up making some mistakes and then make a second...

Timelapse: How the sausage is made.

July 2021September 2022Leave a comment

How the sausage is made. Re-shooting the steam bending video for my F1 Kayak design. The existing videos are fine, I’m just kind of obsessed with making this particular part of the building course as perfect as possible....

Video: Slicing up some gorgeous bending oak

July 2021September 2022Leave a comment

Slicing up some gorgeous bending oak from Zena Forest Products to send overseas with my kayak building kits. I don’t sell bending oak domestically anymore because people can order it a lot cheaper from J. W. Swan & Sons (or pick some up in person from Zena), but I’m happy to put it in...

Video: Cutting rib mortises — when sloppy joinery is a good thing

July 2021September 2022Leave a comment

One interesting thing about skin on frame boat building that’s completely different than almost every other type of woodworking is that it’s actually beneficial to do sloppy work. This makes it both faster and more beginner friendly. In normal boat or furniture building, sloppy joints allow for a bit of flexing that slowly becomes...

Video: Laminating curved deck beams

July 2021September 2022Leave a comment

On my website there is a FREE 15 hour Skin on Frame Kayak Prep Course that shows all of the hyper-efficient prep task systems I developed to be able to teach 6 people to build 6 kayaks in 6 days, for 15 years straight. I put this out for free as a way to...

Video: Making beads for the deck rigging on a Greenland kayak

July 2021September 2022Leave a comment

The easy way to make beads for the deck lines on a Greenland Kayak. A drill with a slightly tapered dowel and an angle grinder with a 36 grit sanding wheel. I’m using high density polyethylene here but this also works well with ivory, it just smells a lot worse. I generally don’t make...

On YouTube: Comparing oak species for steam bending

July 2021September 2022Leave a comment

Check out the longer version of this video that we just put up on the Cape Falcon Kayak YouTube channel where I compare the steam bending properties of 2 different White Oak species. We bend each of them at 3 different steaming time intervals, bending each to shapes that you would see in my...

Video: Milling bending oak into canoe ribs

July 2021July 2023Leave a comment

The most important part of steam bending is to start with good bending wood in the first place. This is usually some sort of clear, straight grained, bendable species that is freshly sawn with a relatively high moisture content. After that, how are you break it down makes a big difference in bend-ability and...

Rainy day activities

June 2021September 2022Leave a comment

Rainy day activities: This week I’m rigging the new 14 footer, trying to find the least worst float bags that are currently manufactured, and figuring out seat location and seat balance with various gear loads in various situations. So much of what I do it is just figuring out annoying little technical things. Like...

Experiments with earth pigments

May 2021September 2022Leave a comment

I’m trying to standardize rare earth pigment color recommendations so people have a better idea of what colors they can expect without just pouring in some pigment and hoping for the best on their brand new boat. For this first test I divided 32 ounces of the part B polyurethane into 2 ounce cups...

Oiling the frame with Corey’s Pine Tar Boat Sauce

May 2021September 2022Leave a comment

Generally I finish my frames with Watco danish oil, not because it has any special marine properties but just because it’s relatively inexpensive, it penetrates well, and it dries quickly. In any project where you can’t paint all the surfaces you don’t want a hard encapsulation because water is just going to get behind...