North Alaskan Kayak Frame Build, Day 6: Making good progress today. After yesterday‘s debacle it was nice to see the deck shape for the smaller of the two kayaks come together easily.
After making some final adjustments to the larger kayak deck shape it was time to temporarily set up the keel to check the rocker. This is always a bit of a hold your breath moment because the accuracy of the rocker serves as a final check on the accuracy of the sheer and it’s not uncommon at this point to have to start over with new gunwales.
Next it was time to cut up a bunch of bending oak and fire up the steamer to make test ribs. What I’m searching for here is a system that I can use to create the shape of the boat without bending by eye. Clearly many Inuit builders used some sort of measuring system to determine rib lengths, but many also did not, and there is no recorded information from this area. A simple plan view and uniform depth are both highly suggestive. The smaller of the two kayaks used the simplest possible system, a fist width wider than the gunwales at the rib location creates the shape shown in the drawing.
The larger boat with its shaped gunwales is more complicated. Like the previous kayak a set width longer than the kayak width gives me the shape I want in the center but when applied further towards the ends results in too much rocker, Interestingly by almost exactly the same amount as the gunwales are shaped down in that location, leading to the speculation that if the gunwale was a consistent height along the curve of the shape a simple system might work for this kayak as well.
The only problem with this theory is that it doesn’t look like that is what’s happening in Harvey’s drawing. It’s entirely possible this kayak was free bent but the rib consistency is so perfect that I suspect a system. Moreover, I just like rib length systems, and if I decide to turn this into a Cape Falcon Kayak plan I’ll have to figure one out anyways. I’ll sleep on it and start again tomorrow.
___
This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
