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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…
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Building a Perfect Kayak: Part Four
With the design steps over, I moved on to figuring out what wood to build this craft with, but, first, I fired off an email to Gregg Carlson suggesting a few improvements for his excellent program, Hulls. I suggested that he should have the program calculate the Block and Mid-ship Coefficients, which would help simplify the process for inputting the data into KAPER. He promptly wrote me back, and mentioned that he was thinking about setting up a project on Source Forge, and that he had been thinking about adding a feature to Hulls that would round the forms for strip building. I’m crossing my fingers, and if you have…
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Building a Perfect Kayak: Part Five
Background Way back in episode two, I explained about station forms and what they are used for, and I mentioned the strong back. If you don’t remember all that dribble then you may want to head back there for review, because in this episode they are the main character. Attempt One So, after I had finished milling the strips I went to the local lumber store and picked up a couple sheets of 1/2″ CDX plywood (BTW, including labor after this episode my kayak costs $593.76, so far.) The forms of the kayak are laid out on this CDX plywood and then cut out and aligned on the strong back.…
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Building a Perfect Kayak: Part Six
Those Little Setbacks in Boat Building My old strong back was beautiful. Built from some of the best 16′ 2x8s I’ve ever seen, and topped with a lovely almost clear 16′ 1×6, the strong back was straight true, and had proven it on several canoes. But as all great things come to an end, my strong back ended its life on a burn pile in the woods somewhere. I gave it away before moving to Minnesota, and they left it in the rain and the snow, and by spring, it was done. Firewood it became. My current strong back, unlike my old one, is a hunk of junk. Somehow, somewhere,…
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Building a Perfect Kayak: Part Seven
Having finished the bottom of the kayak, I flipped it over and for the first time got to see – I mean really see – my kayak. It was a stunning moment. Not only did the stems look true to each other and not twisted (I guess all the work I did beating the heck out of my strong back worked,) but also the shape and rise of the sheer line was fair and beautiful. I quickly cleaned up the shop and got the tape measure out. The first and only measurement I took was from the rear deck, which is much higher than I had hoped, so I’ll have…
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Building a Perfect Kayak: Part Eight
A perfect kayak not only is one that performs perfectly in all the aspects that you desire, but one that you are building and have designed can only be perfect if everything goes correctly, the shape ends up as you wanted it, and then when finished it performs better than anything else that you’ve paddle. Such a perfect kayak would fail as a learning experience. I’ve often found that I and other people that have worked for me learn more from the mistakes they have made on their own, than having their hand held along the way and achieving perfection. I figured this out with my first and only $60,000…
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Building a Perfect Kayak: Part 9
With the fiberglassing finished on the bottom of the kayak, I flipped the kayak over and started in at the Layback Lounge. If you recall from the now many previous chapters of this building log, I needed to do a cockpit recess to get the back coaming height down to a level that would allow layback rolls. Although not as low as many Greenland kayaks, nor as long as some low volume kayaks, I wanted to get the lip down to about 8 to 8.5″. To do this, I had to make a huge recess in the kayak. Designing the kayak for a recess like this allows a good amount…
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Building a Perfect Kayak: Part Ten
Last episode, I wrote about Free!Ship, and now with version 2 out, I’ve been able to recalculate by hydrostatics using the Free!Ship program to provide me with numbers that I had to calculate and figure by hand in the third episode of this builder’s log. With the new numbers, I’ve come up with some more realistic numbers for Resistance, and the like. Opps, I forgot to account for long tons when using FREE!ship. My calculations via hand and mind were actually closer than I thought. Here are the updated numbers: Design Name: Siskiwit Bay Length Overall: 17′ Beam: 21.5″ Volume: 11.81 cu. ft. Cockpit Size: 30″ x 15″ Coaming Height:…
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Building a Perfect Kayak: Part Eleven
Woe is I; I made a mistake. I forgot that for displacement, a ton is a long ton and not just 2000 pounds, which is what I’ve been using to convert the numbers in FREE!ship to pounds. With this realization, I’ve had to readjust part 10 for KAPER and the like. It also means that FREE!ship and HULLS calculate displacement so similar that it’s better than good enough for government work. The other good news is that the new KAPER numbers are very very close to the calculations that I did by hand way back at the start of this project. Looks like I still remember geometry and physics. And…
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Siskiwit Bay: The Initial Test
Sunday, no wind, the leaves on the hills surrounding town on their last legs, but yet golden with color, hardly a cloud in the sky, the perfect temperature of fifty degrees set the scene for the first test run of the Siskiwit Bay. We loaded the kayak on my car and drove a few back roads before turning on to Highway 61 and then into the municipal campground. At our destination of the boat ramp by the old power plant, we unloaded the kayak and set it into the cold blue water of Lake Superior. The private docks sat ashore pulled for the end of the season, and only two…
