Re-gasketing. Everything else on this old boy leaks like a sieve, but at least the neck will be dry now....
Blog
Rigging the new kayak today
Rigging the new kayak today. Most of this is my standard arrangement: Slide Lock foot braces, Snap Dragon back band, English bridle leather deck lines with HDPE toggles tied through the gunwales for a deck line you can TRUST to actually hold things in place and to use for rescue and carrying. There are...
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Another long work day, coating the river kayak
Another long work day. We coated the river kayak today and used the opportunity to reshoot our kayak coating videos to update our ever-evolving tips and instructions and to get clearer views of the process. The coating we use on our kayaks is the two-part polyurethane sold by Corey Freedman at the Skinboat School....
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Skinning day is always a feast for the eyes.
Skinning day is always a feast for the eyes. Just a few more days until I get to try out the latest version of my river touring kayak.......
Sending kayak building supplies to East Greenland
A month after sending them, these Kayak building supplies finally arrive in the tiny village of Tiilerilaaq on the East Coast of Greenland. This isolated community is serviced by a supply ship that comes a couple times a year and the occasional helicopter. Working from my videos first and then from a copy of...
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Catching up on videos
I’m very lucky to be able to make a living with these gadgets, but I’m seriously starting to miss life before video when a kayak build took a week instead of a month, and I got to see my students in person. Today we are re-shooting our float bags for skin-on-frame kayaks video, and...
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Video: Welcome to the apocalypse.
Not exactly the seven trumpets that I was picturing, but I don’t think we can definitively rule it out either......
Checking float bag fit
One thing I absolutely cannot abide in any touring kayak is poorly thought out storage solutions. This presents a significant challenge for skin on frame kayak builders due to the texture of the frame and the space it takes up inside the skin. The only way that I’ve found to get satisfactory results is...
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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...
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Stringer decisions on the new river kayak prototype
After a month of way too much video production and way too little actual boat building it was a relief to turn off the studio lights and finally make some decent progress on the new version of the river kayak. I got the keel and all the stringers on… and then promptly cut them...
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Video: The first Cape Falcon COVID casualty
Well, The first Cape Falcon COVID casualty is that we are officially out of bending oak. This last batch of ribs went out yesterday and I just ribbed my own kayak with scrap wood! Hopefully we can get more in the not too distant future so the vintage 1940s Parks planer doesn’t starve. Chomp...
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Always filming…
Always filming….today we made a tutorial showing how to put a drain plug in a skin on frame kayak. Drain plugs are something I’ve done in the past but not very often because I was on such a tight schedule to get six boats done in six days with six students. It’s also just...
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This clever little tool is called a Slickplane
This clever little tool is called a Slickplane. Technically a radius plane, it rides the corner of a piece of wood and breaks the edge. Truthfully these are poorly manufactured and fussy to get running cleanly, (hence the video outtake) but they also aren’t that expensive and make the tedious job of rounding stringers...
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Video: GoPro clips from the river kayak test on the Clackamas River
While I work on the newer version of the skin on frame river touring kayak, I thought I’d throw up another edit of GoPro clips from our test on the Clackamas River a few weeks ago. This is really the sort of water this boat is designed for. It has to be capable of...
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Video: Using the experimental kayak build to reshoot our kayak building courses
The nice thing about using the deck of my F1 kayak as the foundation for my experimental river kayak, is that I can use it to get a head start on replacing all the existing videos in our online kayak building courses with the far crispier visuals and sound we are able to achieve...
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