Skin on Frame River Touring Kayak Day 4, tying on stringers.
Things slowed down a little bit today while I was trying to decide how I wanted to place the stringers and terminate the keel. Like I said yesterday, the thing that will eat more time than anything in a build is stopping to ponder things that you have no real way to evaluate anywhere but on the water. Even knowing this I still have to force myself to stop thinking and keep building.
Something I do on all my own kayak designs is add a little secondary stringer that gets tacked onto the bottom of the gunwale with little pegs. The tiny bit of extra volume that it adds helps to overcome one of the biggest challenges of skin boats: creating a reliable chunk of buoyancy at extreme angles of heel so you can edge hard and sweep without accidentally crossing the balance point. Of course the rest of the hull has to be shaped right for this to actually work.
I swept the secondary stringers up to the top of the gunwale in the bow for purely aesthetic reasons, and terminated them where I did in the stern because that was the length of wood that I happen to have on hand to make them out of. On my F1 there’s a very important reason that these terminate where they do on that boat but it doesn’t apply to what I’m doing here. If I had an extra foot of stick I would’ve made the secondary stringers longer.
Inspired by the North Alaskan kayaks, I really like how the ends are coming together. I’m working to preserve as much volume and bluntness at the ends as I can to reduce the risk of pinning in whitewater.
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