Day 3, Skin on Frame River Touring Kayak: Bending ribs and lashing the keel.
I started the day by reluctantly admitting that the steam box I’ve been using for the last 12 years has finally expired. It’s always hard to let things like this go even if it’s just something you made out of 1×2’s and scrap plywood. The time it spends in the shop, the people who use it, the boats they make, the random notes that get scratched on the outside, the glue that gets spilled on it, somehow all that stuff adds up to the soul of an object, a repository of memories that will fade in its absence.
With the new box complete we set about ribbing which was a mostly uneventful affair. With the general hull shape defined I checked the keel which needed to be thinned a bit on the tablesaw and shaped a bit on the ends to flex the way I wanted without undue stress. Next I used a couple of thin battens to determine the length of the very short ribs at each end, and then replaced them with actual ribs.
After this I used some 1/8th inch dowels to peg some of the ribs in place, generally the ones that I will be setting my clamps on.
People ask why I don’t peg all of the ribs and there’s several very good reasons for this. The first is that my minimalist sensibilities chafe against unnecessary work, and the dowels are only needed to hold the frame together until the skin goes on, so not pegging all the ribs saves me time. .
The other reason is that the slight bit of movement helps to fair the hull. It’s amazing how sensitive our eyes are and a rib that can rise up even 1/16th of an inch in the mortise can sweeten what would otherwise look like an awful wobble.
My final reason for not pegging all the ribs is that if you’re punching out through a heavy surf zone and manage to get some serious air out the back of a wave, the landing puts immense stress on those tiny pegs in the cockpit area which can result in a nasty split along the entire line of pegs. Functionally this isn’t an issue because the skin holds everything together, but it’s still not exactly what I want to look at when I’m getting in and out of my boat.
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