North Alaska replica kayak frame build, Day 16. We started the day by bending in the ribs in both kayaks only to immediately realize that the rocker was wrong on the longer kayak. This was pretty painful considering that I’ve already ribbed this kayak twice precisely so I could avoid this exact situation, and to add insult to injury it turns out my very first rib measuring system was actually correct.
I was initially almost certain that this kayak was built by simply extending the hand plus the thumb past the width of the gunwales to get the rib length at that location. This worked perfectly in the center of the kayak but gave me too much rocker towards the ends, so I acquiesced to a complex progressive rib length measurement, that produced the desired rib shape and rocker, however, all kayak decks will flatten as you build them but the effect varies wildly, so you can’t compensate. Well it turns out that mine flattened exactly the amount that would have brought my original rib measuring system into perfect harmony with the recorded rocker. This puts to rest a mystery that has been driving me crazy but it did mean that we had to completely re-rib the kayak, again. It’s annoying and expensive but also adds to my library of rib length systems knowledge which is a huge part of my business.
We also bent the coamings which required quite a bit of muscle at nearly twice the thickness of my normal coamings. Both of these coamings have a compound curve that we had to force in immediately after bending the hoop.
Finally I decided yet again that I needed to rebuild the curved deck beam at the front of the cockpit on the small boat because it just doesn’t match the historic photos. I decided to go with an oversized lap joint for this one. Which will give me plenty of room to carve exactly the shape I want.
So that was today, not exactly the progress I was hoping for but we’re still grinding ahead.
___
This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
