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Can I sign up for an in-person class?
Do you sell kits?
Do you offer plans in metric measurements?
How much should I budget for my build?
Do the videos expire? Can I watch on multiple devices?
I don’t have internet in my shop, can I download the videos to watch later?
Why can’t I buy canoe plans without the building course?
Why can’t I buy kayak plans without the kayak building course?
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Can I sign up for an in-person class?
For many years, I led in-person classes out of our former workshop in Nehalem, Oregon, and at various locations around the world. Health issues prevent me from teaching in person these days, which is why I developed our online courses. Our kayak and canoe video courses are more comprehensive than anything I ever taught in the shop, and I am always available via email, text, or phone to support you during your build.
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Do you sell kits?
We sell partial building kits for our kayaks, which include the harder to build and harder to source items you’ll need for your build, and save you time and shipping fees in sourcing all the outfitting for your boat. We do not sell the longer wood, as it is cost prohibitive to ship 14 – 16 foot lumber. Ribs for kayaks and canoes can be sourced through our partner at J.W. Swan & Sons, and skin and coating can be purchased through Skinboats.org.
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Do you offer plans in metric measurements?
Because the accompanying video courses call out imperial measurements, and we are constantly making updates to both the plans and videos, we’ve found that metric plans leave a lot of room for potential confusion or error. For builders outside the US, we recommend purchasing a metric to imperial tape measure to make your build easier.
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How much should I budget for my build?
In addition to the cost of the course and plans, you should budget $550–$750 for a kayak build. Average materials cost for a canoe runs around $450. Materials costs vary based on the size boat you are building, local availability and shipping costs, so that could be as low as $300 for a small pack canoe or $700 for a tandem canoe.
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Do the videos expire? Can I watch on multiple devices?
You can login and view our courses on any device. Enrolling in a course gives you lifetime access to the course material, including any updates or additions we make to the material in the future. In fact, that’s one of the main reasons we created these video courses instead of writing a book, because our designs and techniques are constantly evolving and we want you to always have access to the best and most up-to-date information.
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I don’t have internet in my shop, can I download the videos to watch later?
You can download individual videos to your device, but be aware that file sizes can be quite large.
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Why can’t I buy canoe plans without the building course?
Because this is a building system not a plan for a specific boat, there are no standalone plans.
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Why can’t I buy kayak plans without the kayak building course?
Unlike nearly all other forms of boatbuilding, skin-on-frame building has never seen the sort of commercial application that leads to good standardized building practices. Instead, what we have is a small handful of books written by experienced hobbyists. Using the techniques in these books, skin-on-frame building is slower, less efficient, heavier, and less durable than it needs to be.
This is where I started out 20 years ago. Using these books in combination with open access to kayak historian Harvey Golden’s research library, I quickly surpassed the existing knowledge, building 15 kayaks my first year and almost twice that my second. From there I taught in-person skin-on-frame kayak building classes, producing between 50–80 kayaks per year for the next 12 years. To put it simply, in 20 years of building well over 1000 skin on frame kayaks I developed better kayak designs, and much faster, easier, and more durable ways to build them. Many of these techniques just make the overall building process much simpler and more enjoyable, but some of these techniques are unique to my kayaks. My modern designs are often built with extreme tensions and unfair lines that, while barely visible in the finished product, are critical to performance.
“Ok, but I’ve built skin on frame boats before.” I get this a lot, so if that’s you, let’s dig a bit deeper here. Let’s say you’re going to clamp a stringer on my F1 design, all you’ve got to do is just measure the heights and clamp right? So you go and try to do that in the logical sequence, but every time you go to push the stringer up for that last clamp in the stern the whole thing snaps flat or blasts sideways off the boat. After about six frustrating tries you make the logical assumption that my measurement must be wrong, so you clamp it on ½ inch lower down, and it works fine and gives better skin to rib clearance which makes sense. Later on you get the boat out on the water and kick it up on edge to see this magic F1 edge-turn for yourself….and nothing happens. Why? It’s because of what you did with that chine. What you were supposed to do is clamp the stringer on with 2 inch metal spring clamps at a downward diagonal angle, starting at rib 11, then 1, then 5, then 15, and THEN you can get that last rib to chine connection to stay put in the stern. It’s simple and not hard, but also not at all intuitive, and not described in any book.
Take what I just wrote and apply it to a hundred other things about the kayak, and you can see right away why the video course makes a huge amount of sense. You get to skip the 20 year learning curve and have more fun building a better kayak faster.