North Alaskan kayak frame build, Day 2). Today I continued my efforts to match the sheer curve of the survey kayak, building two more models, the last of which is satisfactory.
Owing to the finished dimensions, I believe the original builder may have started with sawn planks 4 inches wide, which would have been consistent with it’s early 20th century heritage. This particular gunwale is not as heavily shaped as others of the type, the bottom of which appears to just follow the straight plank edge. The scoop of the shaping is deepest 25% of the way from the ends, which makes the gunwale a little more flexible in that area encouraging a shape that is fuller towards the ends than a fair curve, which is generally what you want in any sort of boat.
I also started work on a couple of plunge router jigs that will make the mortising for the flat deck beams much easier. The peaked deck beams will still need to be mortised by eye and by hand. I’ll probably put up a quick tutorial on YouTube sometime in the next few days for how to make these jigs. It’s one of those things that isn’t hard to understand but can be really frustrating to execute if you’re not familiar with the sequence of events.
I feel confident starting on the full-size boat tomorrow.
___
This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
