After a month of way too much video production and way too little actual boat building it was a relief to turn off the studio lights and finally make some decent progress on the new version of the river kayak. I got the keel and all the stringers on… and then promptly cut them all back off.
The whole time I was tying on the stringers I found myself chafing at the complexity of the extra stringer and the weight it was adding to the boat.
It probably seems silly to worry about 1 pound of weight and 2 hours of time but those things can really add up to where you start to lose the magic of skin on frame. I’m not gonna say that I never add weight or complexity but I definitely demand that they earn their keep.
So I started trying to figure out if there was another way to do this. The initial thought was to make the second stringer out of cedar but taller, mount it lower, and ditch the little secondary stringer on the gunnel which should maintain roughly the same stability, and save about a pound, but I wasn’t willing to give up the extra chunk of volume that the secondary stringer was adding all the way up front in the bow.
It was only when I finished tying off the last stringer that I had the idea that maybe I could just sweep the big stringer from the ribs up onto the gunwale to accomplish the same thing. It would save a pound in a kayak that is already heavier than I prefer, and the labor of omitting the gunwale mounted stringer would offset the extra labor of tying on the second stringer. So I cut the stringers off and started over.
Of course looking at it now I’m starting to worry that the angle of incidence between the new upward swept chines and the flow of the water might create turbulence. It’s A pretty big risk to take on a kayak design that I just got working really well, but considering the potential payoff I think it’s worth it.
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