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..NEWSKAYAKS YOU CAN BUILD - an illustrated guide to plywood construction by TED MOORES AND GREG ROSSEL 
The dramatic growth in the popularity of kayaks is perhaps not surprising in a world of pricey, obnoxiously loud personal water-craft. As a low impact way to explore wilderness or to paddle through cottage country, these elegant, easy to transport craft are hard to beat. The availability of kits with pre-cut plywood components has given a growing number of paddlers the freedom to build a strong lightweight kayak to their specifications and at a reasonable price. The common building methods used are "stitch and glue" or "tack and tape". A typical stitch and glue kayak kit contains pre-cut plywood planks, epoxy and hardware. To assemble the hull, holes are drilled along each plank's edge and the plank is temporarily wired or "stitched" to the adjoining plank. The seams are then glued and covered with epoxy and fibreglass cloth. This simple construction process demands neither special skills nor a woodworking shop. All that is necessary is the desire to build it right. Since its roots can be traced to backyard boat-building, it's not surprising that using plywood to build a kayak encourages experimentation and innovation. There are many good ways to use the material, and Kayaks You Can Build is intended to be used as a resource for all builders, regardless of the method they have chosen to build their boat. Much of the book is dedicated to showing you how to perform each of the construction steps in an efficient and safe manner. The three featured kayaks illustrate the many different possibilities for combining the basic building techniques. Following these instructions will enable you build to build a beautiful , professional -quality kayak in your first attempt. As professional boat-builders and teachers, we understand the challenges faced by the first time builder and have tried to address these by demonstrating that professional quality combines a state of mind and a few shortcuts applied in the right places; by Some independent - minded builders feel restricted by the prosaic constraints of working with a manufacturers manual. There is always a temptation to skip steps, to do them out of order or to give more tedious tasks a lick and a promise so that you can get to the good parts. This is bad news in boat-building because the process is a continuum, with each new piece dependent on the placement and quality of the previous one. We'll tell you the reasons why certain steps are important and which steps in the process can be streamlined. That said you will make mistakes. The trick is to keep those miscues to a minimum and ensure that any repairs are top quality. Unfortunately, few stock manuals have the space to help novices correct mistakes or, better yet, avoid them. Well, mistakes do happen and we document some common ones, how they were remedied and how they could have been avoided in the first place. The techniques and tools suggested in this book are tried and true and a great place to start, but they are not the only way. A big part of boat building is problem-solving, invention, borrowing technology from one application and using it in another, and utilising the tools and solutions you are familiar with. So sharpen up that block plane and you'll be out on the water before you know it. (from the Introduction by the authors) 255 pages, 450 colour photographs CONTENTS: The Enterprise 17'4" Kayak Drawn by Steve Killing along the lines of his successful Endeavour 17' (a soft-chined sea kayak designed for strip planking) the Entreprise combines straight forward stitch-and-glue building methods and a few traditional boat-building components, with some Bear Mountain innovations thrown in. Using forms to build the hull upside down is a well proven system adapted from wood-strip/epoxy building methods. A traditional feature is the use of stems to control the ends of the planks and to add integrity to the ends of the hull. Although stems are unheard of in light stitched-seam construction, the effort to make them is more than compensated for by the time they save, as well as the help they provide to make the shape of the kayak predictable. An important Bear Mountain innovation is bonding of the deck to the sheer clamp. This allows us to join the hull and deck from the outside rather than enduring the ungraceful exercise of glassing from the inside and doing an end pour. For pricing and availability contact us at info@bearmountainboats.com or see our order on-line section to order this book. |
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