Finishing and oiling the new river kayak prototype frame

I may never learn to properly set a spokeshave but dammit, I’m a surgeon with an angle grinder and a 36 grit sanding wheel! This morning I finished up the new river touring kayak frame and put a coat of oil on. I don’t tend to get too precious with this sort of work because whether you spend 20 minutes cleaning up a frame or 3 hours, once you throw a skin on it it looks basically the same.

Following yesterday’s re-stringering insanity I woke up this morning and decided to put the little secondary stringer on after all. In hindsight my original plan was probably fine but putting the stringers on twice let me tweak the scantling sizes and positions a bit so I still think it’s probably a net gain.

What I’m trying to accomplish here is a little more volume and primary stability for when I’m buried deep in the foam, and possibly some carving ability, but hopefully without compromising the speed, tracking, or slipperiness of the hull too much. One thing I really liked about the last one is that when I got stuck sideways on a rock water didn’t pile up on the upstream side it just slipped right under me which was kind of cool.

I feel like I’m close to a critical threshold where if the boat sits much higher in the water or gets too boxy it’s going to lose it’s surprising quickness. Hard to really know where that threshold is though until we actually cross it.

So far the frame has gained an appalling 3 pounds over the previous model. A pound of that is some extraneous modifications I made, but the other two are just the unavoidable consequence of stronger heavier wood along the bottom of the boat and a bump up in overall size. For fit and feel I actually really liked the size of the last one but if we’re serious about Whitewater performance here getting up on top of the water a little more makes a big difference in handling, especially when loaded with a week of camping gear.

We’ll see how it actually turns out in a few days. It’s always interesting to see what modifications produce the results you expected and which ones you end up being totally wrong about.