North Alaskan Kayak Frame Build, Day 1) Started the day by sharpening my tools and trying to get back into a boat building mindset. Although I did buy a couple of carving knives specifically for this build, generally I don’t have much in the way of fancy handtools. It’s not so much about money as just keeping my kit as simple as possible. After a while you realize what you actually use and the rest is just clutter. Also I tend to be pretty hard on things so expensive Japanese chisels are wasted on me.
The first step in the build is just trying to get the shape of the gunwales. How I approach this is by starting with the tangent of the gunwale angle and multiplying it by half the width of the kayak. This tells you what the natural rise of the sheer would be at that gunwale angle (assuming it’s consistent which sometimes it’s not) which can then be drawn onto the drawing, and then the disagreement between the actual sheer and this line can be measured as a starting point for shaping the gunwales.
Next I make a half scale model of the gunwales and check my assumptions against reality, which is about as far as I got today.
North Alaskan kayaks are about the middle of the pack as far as the challenge of reproducing the sheer curve. There are even more difficult kayaks but I tend to avoid them!
As a builder what excites me about doing this kind of work is just trying to get into the mind of the original builder. Trying to understand the system and the logic they were using. You can tell when you’re on the right track because each step will flow naturally into the next without having to employ difficult or overly complicated solutions. For example I can tell by the shape of this kayak that if I can manage to get the gunwale shape accurate, I’m almost certain that a super simple rib length system will reproduce the shape. That’s only if I get it right though. Today’s model is OK but not accurate yet. So tomorrow I make another and see if I can get a little closer.
___
This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
