This week we are updating and re-shooting the skinning portion of our skin on frame kayak building course, which gets rid of the very last videos that we shot before making major upgrades to our studio lighting, audio equipment, and presentation style a few years ago.
This gives me a much needed opportunity to upgrade the existing instructions and add a bunch of new content based on my own experimentation and the feedback that I’m always getting from students. I’m adding detailed information for working with a bunch of different types of nylon fabric as well as detailed instructions for how to color with rare earth pigment and not end up with a horrible streaky looking boat. This is the blessing and the curse of being a prolific experimenter with a small army of builders, every few years I have to toss out the earlier videos and start over!
The skinning system I use is beginner friendly, drum tight, and about twice as fast as any other way you can skin a kayak. It takes me about four hours to stitch up a boat. Nothing wrong with other methods, this is just what works for me.
Once we’re done filming and editing I’m hoping to release this as a separate mini course for anyone who wants to use our skinning method but not necessarily our overall boat building system.
Why pay for something that is probably already included in your SOF book for free? The answer is that if you took every single skinboat book out there and combined it with three days of searching on every Internet forum, you still wouldn’t encounter half of the things that you need to know to avoid many of the common skinning disasters. I could fill 10 posts with real world examples of easily avoidable skinning disasters.
Heck, I just had a skinning disaster the other day working with a new type of nylon, and now I’m out the cost of the materials +4 days of my time to redo it. That’s the sort of thing I try to help people avoid. Nobody wants horrible colors, saggy skins, crushed frames, or peeling coating!
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This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
