North Alaska Replica Kayak Frame Build Day 11. Today we got all of the flat deck beams shaped and installed, and got started on the more challenging peaked and arched beams.
The attachment method for the arched deck beam directly in front of the cockpit is different on each kayak. The smaller kayak uses a birdsmouth sitting on top of the gunwale, the larger appears to be let in with some kind of blind mortise. This is another case where the original method of just choosing an appropriate looking arch and letting it into the gunwales was likely an order of magnitude easier than trying to reverse engineer that process to match the exact arch and the exact gunwale width and angle.
Once we were finished with both kayaks it was clear that while the height of the arches was close enough, the shape of the arches didn’t match the interior photos of the original kayaks. So we had to start over and laminate new blanks.
In the meantime we used the existing arches to mock up our deck stringers to get the heights for the peaked deck beams directly in front of the cockpit. Again this process was originally driven organically by available crooks as is evidenced by the variety of deck shapes for the type. Reverse engineering the crux so everything lines up is a bit of a brain bender but I’m enjoying it because it’s testing my layout skills. if it were just a nice clean square pieces of wood or even size laminations that would be a little bit easier but because we are mimicking the look of natural crooks Everything has to be built over sized and then carved down to look like crooks. A bit silly, but we’re being paid to make a historic replica, so that’s what we’re doing.
Someone asked in a comment if there was a picture of the kayaks we are building. There are photographs but I’m not allowed to share them. I did take a couple of pictures of the survey is in Harvey‘s book though. The longer kayak at 16 feet is shown above the frame drawing of a similar type. The shorter kayak at 14 feet is shown by itself in the last photo.
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