While we grind through video work for the next couple weeks I’m sharing some of my favorite skin boat images:
In yesterday‘s post I talked about a commission I took 10 years ago to build a replica of a Hudson Bay kayak completely from scratch. The customer had an old wood block print given to him by his father and he wanted to know if I could figure out what kind of a kayak was in it and if I could reproduce it. Of course I had no idea but fortunately Harvey Golden was able to help me out and we decided it was a Belcher Islands kayak, and Harvey supplied the appropriate surveys and historical information.
The customer wanted the kayak reproduced completely from driftwood with hand tools, and thank God the vintage of the kayak survey we were working from allowed us to use metal tools at least.
Unable to get any sort of sea mammal hides, my friend Patrick hand cut deer rawhide line in surprising lengths with incredible accuracy. (I will find out 12 years later that there is nothing commercially available that can approximate this). Patrick also made me a knife and a small adze that he forged from old tool steel I gave him, and I managed to dredge up a draw knife, handsaw, bit and brace, froe, carving axe, and adze from my tools, and made a crooked knife but heating up an old deck knife and bending it around a stick.
I already talked about making the ribs and the coaming, For the longitudinal members I hand split red cedar driftwood into pieces that were roughly 2 to 3 times the scantling size required, and we worked them down from there. For the deck beams we roamed the beaches trying to find appropriate natural crooks.
Of course someone who actually knew what they were doing would be much more efficient with all this but for me and Tom the work was pretty hard. Adzing and gripping snot-slick hide rope 10 hours a day resulted in aching hands and elbows that would bother both of us for the next couple years. The real pain was when we would screw something up and have to go back out to the beaches and find new wood and start over.
The finished frame was absolutely stunning, but if I ever do this again I will charge double!
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This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
