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Building Ken Taylor 1959 Kayak-the Igdlorssuit – Launching
Wetting the kayak in the crystal clear water of Lake Superior was the best reward for almost a year of building. Ilena and I launched the Iggy with little fanfare. John Amren, owner of Superior Coastal Sports in Grand Marais was the only other attendee, and he was there because we choose the beach behind his shop as our point of departure for a tour around the Grand Marais harbor. The Iggy is a semi-replica of the 1959 Ken Taylor kayak that spawned the Anas Acuta and spurred modern British recreational kayaking. The original Iggy was built as a skin-on-frame in Igdlorssuit (Illorsuit is the new spelling) by Emanuele Korneiliussen.…
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Building Ken Taylor 1959 Kayak – the Igdlorssuit – Launching – Susie Islands
The second trip with the Iggy involved a trip from Grand Portage, out to the Susie Island and then to the border.
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How to Make a Fiberglass Skeg
A skeg is an effective tool that can help control a kayak in difficult conditions. In quartering wind and waves, it can be a godsend. For the average backyard builder, commercial skegs tend to be expensive and most backyard builders will have the skills to fabricate their own. When looking at skeg options, I’ve never been able to find a wooden one that satisfied my sense of durability and simplicity. So, I set out to make a fiberglass skeg that would work well in a wooden kayak. Below you’ll find the steps that I took. Come up with the size and shape of the skeg that you want to build.…
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2007 Meet at the Beach – Minnesota
Join us for Minnesota’s first wooden boat Meet at the Beach. The event will occur on Lutsen Resort’s beautiful beach the weekend of June 16-17. All wooden kayak and canoe builders are welcome to bring their boats to show off and let others paddle them in the waters of Lake Superior. Every type of wooden construction is welcome from Stitch and Glue, cedar strip, skin-on-frame, and everything in between. And the event is open to the public.
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Building a Kayak Paddle – A La Volkskayak
Many thanks to VOLKSKAYAK designer Gerry Gladwin for allowing me to share his idea and the diagram with others who want to do it for themselves. I hope the instructions below will be helpful in making a simple, light, cheap sea kayak paddle that’s very serviceable. We’ve been using three of these for several seasons now, and apart from some cosmetic damage, have had no problems with them. The cost is under $25 per paddle. I can get one done to the “finished with the epoxy work” stage with about a day’s work. Our paddles weigh a little under a kilogram; mine’s 950gms., while the one my wife made for…
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Nessmuking and Stitch and Glue Boat Building
Eskimo Tom Gerds, professional wooden boat builder and owner of Finewoodwatercraft.com, writes about using stitch and glue boat building techniques to create canoes and kayaks that Nessmuk would have been proud to paddle. Learn about his lightweight building secrets as he presents a great overview to the S&G process.
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A Paddle with a Twist: Making a Feathered Kayak Paddle
The main problem homebuilders face when trying to build a feathered kayak paddle is how to make the feather. Most builders either buy an adjustable ferrule that allows several different angles of feathering for the paddle or they build a scarfing jig that allows them to cut the shaft at an angle to give the proper feather and later they glue the two pieces together. The third method, which is the one that I like, involves twisting a multiple laminates to the feathered angle and holding them in place on a building form while the glue dries. This article describes the third method. Choosing Materials Materials Needed: The laminates for…
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Easy Aluminum Fittings For a Sailing Canoe
Canoe sailing enthusiast Charles E. Campbell describes an easy method of making aluminum fittings for a sailing canoe. These specialized fittings are hard to find, but even harder to find is any information on how to make the fittings yourself. Nessmuking is proud to host this informative article.
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How To Make Woven Rope Carrying Handles
Pedro Almeida describes how to make Rope handles for your kayak. These work well as carry handles for singles and especially doubles for those who don't want or need a typical end toggle on their kayak.
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Vacuum Bagging Techniques for Canoes and Kayaks
I’m going to assume, for the purposes of brevity, that we’re working with a finished, female mold, which is coated and sealed to the point of being airtight. It is easy to vacuum bag over a male mold, as well; the technique is identical. I’ll also assume that the mold has a peripheral flange (a sealed surface, not part of the functional mold surface, running the perimeter of the mold). If you’re working on a mold with no flange, vacuum bagging is possible, but you will still need an area, continuous with the mold-laminating surface, to seal to. If your mold is not airtight, I’ll make a note about that…
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Building a Nikumi
Safety Note: A vinyl skin is not safe for normal use. This is for show only. Hundreds of years ago, the Aleuts paddled slender kayaks up and down the west coast of North America in search of sealskins and adventure. Their kayaks, called baidarkas by the Russians, were typically narrow, fast, and featured crazy looking bifid or split bows. I first gained an interest in this type of kayak after reading George Dyson’s visionary book Baidarka, and the more I read, the more interesting these kayaks became to me. Eventually, I purchased Wolfgang Brinck’s The Aleutian Kayak with the intension of building a traditional baidarka using traditional methods. But, after…
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Light but Strong – Building Cedar Strip Canoes for Wilderness Tripping
Take care of the ounces and the pounds will take care of themselves, is Jay Morrison's motto. Learn how Jay utilized this moto and developed new techniques to build a Wilderness-Tripping-Tough cedar strip canoe weighing 35 pounds.
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Building a Perfect Kayak: My Adventure in Kayak Design and Cedar Strip Building
I stood looking up at the kayak, a plastic Dagger Magellan, inside of our newest yet unopened store in the middle of Iowa. With the sunlight beaming through the sunroof and hitting the plastic of the kayak, which was standing on its end, I could see a small clear flaw. When the rep showed up, I pointed it out and he called to see if he could get a discount. When I mentioned that I was interested in purchasing it, he got an even better price for me – a price well below pro-deal. After he handed the phone over to me, a visa card number later and the boat…
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Building a Perfect Kayak: Part Two
In the last installment of Building a Perfect Kayak, I laid out the design criteria for my new kayak and ran into some software problems. Mainly, with the software that I’m using, I couldn’t export rounded stations to build the forms for the kayak. Because Hulls, the boat design program I used, is made to produce plywood panels, it lacked the features needed to accomplish these rounded stations, so I downloaded and tried a program called Sketch-Up. Kayak Forms First, for those readers that haven’t built a canoe or kayak yet, I should state exactly what the forms are. Forms, or stations, are simply the cross sectional shape of a…
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Building a Perfect Kayak: Part Three
If you remember from the previous article, I had just figured out a way to output forms from Hulls by using an extra chine above the design of the kayak. This extra chine gave me a common point in all the forms, and with the click of two buttons provided me with perfectly aligned offsets to plot on paper (albeit paper which looks like a brown paper bag, because I’m unable to buy white roll or tracing paper in Grand Marais, MN. I can’t wait to see my wood choices or maybe wood choice. Pine looks okay, right?) After I figured this out, I charted the Righting/Heeling Moments for the…
