North Alaska replica kayak frame build, Day 14. Yesterday evening we pegged the deck beams with 1/8 inch dowels. This may or may not be historically accurate for these kayaks because some of the surviving frames are fastened with nails. One would assume, however, that pegs were the standard before contact with Europeans (or Russians) and pegs are certainly nicer if you have to do any additional woodworking.
We started the day today with me doing significant additional carving on the installed deck beams to get the appearance I’m looking for.
Next we sanded and rounded all sharp edges, drilled holes for the deck beam lashings and used a small scorp to let the lashing path into the gunwales, as was commonly done to prevent bumps under the skin.
For the deck beam lashings I had originally planned to use rawhide for a traditional appearance. I did this on a previous kayak using hand cut deer hide, but didn’t have time to source anything like that for this build so I picked up some 1/8 inch rawhide lace at the leather supply store which unfortunately isn’t going to work. The 1/8 lacing is really more like 3/16 which is just too bulky compared to the original lashings to look right. Also, unlike the stretchy but strong deer hide I’ve used in the past this rawhide is surprisingly week easily breaking when I worked with it. So what we ended up with is a $40 bowl of what we are affectionately referring to as dog spaghetti. Tomorrow I’ll be heading out to purchase synthetic sinew. A bit of a disappointment because I really try to make every possible effort to make my historic kayak frames as accurate as possible but I’m sure it will still look beautiful when it’s finished.
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