Introduction
The dramatic growth in the popularity of kayaks is perhaps not surprising in a world of pricey, obnoxiously loud personal watercraft. 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 precut 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 precut 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 fiberglass 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 boatbuilding, 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 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 to build a beautiful, professional-quality kayak in your first attempt.
As professional boatbuilders 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 introducing simple boatbuilding controls that will make the shape of your craft predictable; by reducing exposure time to epoxy and dust to a minimum by finding the shortest route to the best results; and by exploring enough of the "why" behind what we are doing to make the instructions valuable to anyone building a plywood boat, regardless of the method.
Some independent-minded builders feel restricted by the prosaic constraints of working with a manufacturer's 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 boatbuilding 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 boatbuilding is problem-solving, invention, borrowing technology from one application and using it in another, and utilizing 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.
