Making white oak ribs for kayak kit orders today. It always seems kind of insane to me that I have to sell these for four bucks apiece, but the process really doesn’t give me much choice.
We start out by driving a couple hours down to Zena Forest Products where only two out of 100 boards are good enough quality to be set aside for bending oak. Of those only about 50% are clear enough for me, (cost is around $10 BF for 70% clear which translates into about 50% usable.) Back at the shop I feed the boards into the ancient but unstoppable (now) carbide toothed Parks planer to take them down to 1 5/16. Then I put a thin kerf circular saw ripping blade in my tablesaw, and use the sapwood to dial in my thickness and also to get the cut running straight along the grain. It would be so much easier if I could make these ribs 1/4 inch to match the mortise size but what I found over many years is that quarter inch ribs start to collapse pretty badly after about three years of owning the kayak. Bumping up to 17/64 goes a long way towards eliminating this problem although 9/32 is too thick and starts to create other problems with getting the shape right. So that’s where we get 17/64.
Once I’m done ripping about 50 ribs the tablesaw is pretty well clogged I’m covered in fine dust and the blade needs to be removed and cleaned.
Somewhere around 2 to 4 inches from the heart of the board I usually have to call it quits when I start running into bad grain or too many knots. Next I sort the ribs on the ground which usually ends up being about 50% usable 50% not usable. Although sometimes I get lucky and end up with a 70/30 split, And sometimes I get unlucky and end up with some pretty dismal yield if I happened to miss even a single pin knot or forgot to assess the edge of the board for slope at the mill.
Next I clamp them together tightly usually throwing in 3-5 more than ordered, and then we wrap them in plastic to keep the moisture in.
After that Liz does the hard part which is trying to figure out how to get 60 ribs and two kayak kits including spray skirts into a 4x20x35” box headed to Sweden! Total weight 41 lbs. The shipping is brutal but we do our best!
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