Thanks to outsourcing, I am mostly free from mass producing kayak cockpit coamings these days. (I’m also mostly free from making money on them, but that’s just fine with me.) Reshooting our cockpit coaming instructional videos this week necessitated the construction of a small batch.
Here Liz and I tag team nailing on the lips and sanding down the tough white oak.
It took a long time to develop a reliable system for building wooden keyhole-shaped cockpit coamings that strike a balance between spray skirt purchase and knee bracing, both of which are absolutely essential for the type of kayaking I like to do.
We employ a whole series of techniques to torture the wood so it springs back to exactly the shape I’m looking for.
I nail the lips on with bronze ring nails because glue of any kind just isn’t reliable in this application and pegs compromise the strength of the wood more than I’m comfortable with. The really cool thing about nails though is that if you work sequentially you can force any gaps out of the joint between the lip and the coaming. Finally, bronze just feels sort of nautical, making this the least expensive boat ever built with bronze fasteners.
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