The allure of wood: What's involved in building your own wooden kayak

The allure of wood

If you think a wood kayak is limited to the realm of master carpenters, you may be surprised to find out what’s really involved in building one. From the Spring 2010 issue of Coast&Kayak Magazine. Read the entire magazine online.

by Coast&Kayak Magazine

Wood has an undefinable attraction. We emulate it in laminates in our furniture, we pay dearly to make it part of our living environment, and in a few cases master craftsmen make working with it the passion of their lives.

The fact that wood can be as much art as a useful material is just as true in building kayaks, where form and function can combine to create something that looks as good as it performs – or, perhaps surprisingly, perform as good as it looks.

“There’s satisfaction that comes from paddling a boat you built yourself that’s very intense,” says John Lockwood of Pygmy Boats. “People who have done this totally fall in love with their boats.”

In a world of mass production and artificial materials, wood can seem a breath of fresh air. It’s attractiveness as a building material has led to a plethora of kayak kits and plans on the market, so the prospect of picking which boat to build might be as bewildering as the prospect of actually building one.

The good news is you don’t have to be a master craftsman to build any of the options available. But what might be surprising is the skills that are actually involved. In fact, you’re likely to learn more about expoxy and fiberglass than woodworking skills.

Coast&Kayak Magazine talked to some of the experts about what’s involved in building the options available, and while some opinions differ, the basic tenet seems to hold true: if you can follow instructions, you can build any boat option available.

Three basic designs are at the root of all handmade kayaks, all offering widely different end results.

Skin on frame

Based on the traditional eskimo designs that are the precursors to today’s modern kayaks, the skin on frame design has an appeal that is firmly rooted in culture, history and craftsmanship. Actual construction can be as traditional or as advanced as you like. Experts on the subject vary as wildly in construction techniques, from carefully bending willow sticks for the hull to highly machined components utilizing the latest in materials such as aircraft tubing and fabric.

If modern aircraft materials seem out of place in the most traditional of kayak designs, Ted Moore of Bear Mountain Boats sees it as an extension of a long-standing tradition among boat builders: being pragmatic.

“I think boat builders always used best materials and technology available to them,” he says. “For instance, I don’t apologize for using epoxy. I really like what it does.”

A skin on frame may appear to be the quickest of the options to produce. But the process to build one can be involved: cutting the parts, lashing the frame together, triangulating it, cutting and sewing the skin and treating the skin with a resin as the final step.

There’s also the type of kayak you end up with to consider. Skin on frame boats are definitely the lightest of the options, but with considerable potential drawbacks. For instance, without hatches and bulkheads, it limits the practicality to day trips only – a result that shouldn’t be surprising, given the origins.

“They didn’t go camping in these things. They went out for three or four hours, went hunting then came home. If they were out overnight in their boat it was trouble,” says Rod Tait of Orca Boats.

The end performance depends on the design – which can be good or bad, depending on the plans you use. But comfort likely won’t be up to par.

“They’re not exactly the most comfortable. Generally you’re just sitting right on the bottom of the boat, on the wooden frame and right on the material. Some people do put in wooden slats, but you can’t put a comfy seat in there because they are a low volume boat so you can’t raise the centre of gravity high. They’re extremely tippy.”

Ted sees the artistic side of a skin on frame as the most appealing aspect.

“I think it’s one of the most incredible structures I’ve ever seen. If you look at aboriginal kayaks, the engineering is just incredible. It’s probably more of a builder’s boat than a paddler’s boat,” he says.

“I like to build a frame and hang it up and look at it.”

Cedar strip

This may appear to be the epitome of a master craftsmen’s building project: taking a pile of wood strips and converting it into a finished boat.

And certainly it is the artistic option. By using different colors of wood in the decking, a cedar strip boat can indeed become a work of art (to make the point, one is actually on display in the New York Museum of Modern Art).

But there is some contention as to how much of building a cedar strip kayak could actually be considered woodworking. It’s not the mitering, joining and cutting of fancy woodworking. It is laying strips over a frame and using epoxy to bind the strips – and in that respect, it may be more complex but not fundamentally more pure woodworking than a stitch and glue kayak.

The other aspect shared with the stitch and glue option is that the end result is unlikely to be just a wooden boat. It will be a composite of wood and fiberglass, with the fiberglass construction being a whole other skillset very far removed from woodworking.

For Rod, the end result is still more of a craft than other options.

“If you spend 150 hours on a stitch and glue, you’re going to be doing 125 hours of fiberglassing. If you put 400 hours into a wood strip boat, you’re still going to be doing 125 hours fiberglassing, but the rest is going to be woodworking.”

Stitch and glue

The stitch and glue kayak using plywood is either the most difficult or the simplest, depending on your approach. And the simplest approach by far is a kit that provides pre-cut parts.

A pre-cut kit is almost a requirement. Picture the difficulty of the alternative: taking large pieces of plywood and cutting long, graceful curves accurately either with hand tools or a bandsaw – an unlikely prospect with either option.

With kits, on the other hand, the pieces can be pre-cut to microscopic precision using a computer-controlled router. Some kit options include plywood with the designs stamped or paper stencils to be traced onto the plywood for cutting, but most experts will warn you away.

“With several sheets of plywood that have to be joined together to 17 and a half feet long, you have to figure out to cut these out by hand by hand tools – certainly you can’t mount it up on a bandsaw. Even if you could, how can you use a handsaw or bandsaw in a way to cut a continuously curving line 17 and a half feet long with

.004-inch accuracy?” John of Pygmy Boats asks.

By using a pre-cut kit, stitch and glue kayaks can be the simplest, quickest and even cheapest options for building your own boat. It is also lighter than manufactured options such as fiberglass. Plus there is also the potential for a woodworker’s artistry to shine through. John says some of the past Pygmy catalogues have featured models created with exotic woods inlaid on the decks in intricate patterns. Ted, meanwhile, is a fan of aniline dyes.

“It changes the color of the wood but it doesn’t add a pigment so you get the grain of the wood coming through, but it’s a different color,” he says.

His favorite was the effect of black on one kayak.

“I thought it was a sexy looking boat. It looked really aggressive.”