Another Kayak-Building Book

Let's continue the previous discussion of good how-to books on building kayaks. Wood and Canvas Kayak Buildingby George Putz, would seem to cover much the same ground as the previously-mentioned Building the Greenland Kayak : A Manual for Its Contruction and Useby Christopher Cunningham. Both involve the construction of a wooden frame, which is then covered with canvas and painted or otherwise sealed to make waterproof. There is a subtle but important difference between them, however.

Where Cunningham follows, as closely as possible, the authentic Greenland kayak-building tradition, Putz takes a more Western approach. By that I mean that his construction methods follows European and American, rather than Eskimo, boatbuilding methods. Until you put the canvas on, Putz's boat looks a lot like a Western boat, whereas Cunningham's kayak frame looks clearly different, more ... indigenous, if you will. This is by no means to say that Cunningham's is superior (or inferior) -- only different. Interestingly enough, the kayak that Putz presents in his book is a classic Greenland design, and the finished product has some clear similarities to Cunningham's. Nonetheless, Putz's boat has a more modern look and feel, higher freeboard and volume, and more initial stability, and will probably be more appealing to most modern paddlers who have no interest in replicating the arcane skillset of the Greenland Eskimo.

The main design and construction differences are as follows:

Putz's kayak

• all frame members are lightweight


• transverse members are floor timbers


• strength members between chine stringer and sheer stringer consist of numerous short timbers on alternating angles, creating a truss-like structure which serves as the boat's main longitudinal strength members


• frame is fastened with wood screws. All flush joints.


• skin is tacked to the frame with brass tacks

Cunningham's kayak

• Sheer stringer and stem are heavy timbers


• transverse strength members are bent ribs, which extend up to the sheer stringer


• the sheer stringers represent the main longitudinal strength members


• frame members are lashed together. Many mortise-and-tenon joints.


• skin is sewn in place around the frame

Kayak Building Books

For anyone who wants to build their own kayak, there are a good number of books in print to show you how in a variety of construction methods. Among the best are:

The New Kayak Shop: More Elegant Wooden Kayaks Anyone Can Buildand Stitch-and-Glue Boatbuildingby Chris Kulczycki. Chris is the founder of Chesapeake Light Craft, one of the biggest suppliers of kits and plans for kayaks built by the stitch-and-glue method, which relies on thin marine plywood for the hull structure, and epoxy and fiberglass tape to fasten the parts together. Chris's kayak designs are generally attractive, relatively easy to build, and available in a wide range of capabilities, from pond-paddlers to expedition boats for open waters.

The The Strip-Built Sea Kayak: Three Rugged, Beautiful Boats You Can Buildby Nick Schade. Strip building utilizes dozens of thin strips of wood edge-glued around forms, then covered with fiberglass (or carbon fiber, or Kevlar) fabric and epoxy. It permits greater design flexibility than stitch-and-glue -- i.e., the designer can achieve any hull form desired. (In stitch-and-glue, the designs are highly driven by plywood's very limited capacity to bend in two planes at once.) The boats are arguably more attractive as well, and though not necessarily more difficult to build, almost certainly more time-consuming. Schade's workmanship is truly extraordinary. He has another book in the works for International Marine, Building Strip Planked Boats, scheduled for publication this fall. It contains plans for one sea kayak, one tiny double-paddle canoe (a la Wee Lassie), and a dinghy. (The photo of the Petrel kayak design at the top of this post is courtesy of Nick Schade. Plans available from Guillemot Kayaks.)

Building the Greenland Kayak : A Manual for Its Construction and Useby Christopher Cunningham. Chris, the longtime editor of Sea Kayaker magazine, shows how to build a kayak using the Eskimos' skin-on-frame method. The woodworking required is perhaps the most sophisticated of the three, and the wood frame is lashed together, not nailed, screwed, or epoxied. In a logical concession to practicality, the environment, and the law, Chris shows how to "skin" the boat with canvas, rather than sealskin.

All three boatbuilding methods are capable of producing very cool, entirely seaworthy boats that will almost inevitably draw questions and favorable comments on the beach. There are dozens of tradeoffs between them, on matters of weight, ease of construction, durability, appearance, etc. etc., and ultimately the choice comes down to matters of personal preference. But here's a terribly oversimplified nutshell comparison:

• Stitch-and-glue: Easiest to build


• Strip-building: Slickest looking


• Skin-on-frame: Most traditional

As Nick Schade says, home-building isn't the most practical way to own a kayak: you can buy one (especially used) cheaper and a lot quicker than you can build one. But the building process can be fun and fulfilling quite apart from what you do with the boat after the fact. So build a boat if you want to. Given sufficient determination, some ready cash, and an appropriate place to work, almost anyone with even modest woodworking skills and basic hand tools can build a perfectly seaworthy and respectable-looking kayak, and getting something of the "wow" factor doesn't take a whole lot more.

Dreaming of Naked People and Dugout Canoes

A bad omen

In The Hawaiian Canoe, author Tommy Holmes describes how the kahuna, or canoe-building master, identified a good tree from which to build a boat:

"Upon finding what appeared to be a suitable tree, the presiding kahuna ...either retired to his (family shrine) or slept right at the base of the tree to learn in dreams from his deity, or aumakua, as to the suitableness of the tree in question. If there appeared to him in his dream a man or a woman standing naked before him without malo or pau [items of clothing], screening himself or herself from shame with the hand, then he would he would interpret the dream as meaning that the timber of the tree was puha, unsound, and he must look farther."

If he dreamed they were clothed, the tree was OK.

Another method was to watch the activities of an 'elapaio in the grove of koa trees before choosing one. These little birds would light, or not, on a tree, and peck, or not, at insects. Apparently, if they pecked, that implied that there were insects in the trunk and hence, evidence of unsound wood. Even after the tree was felled, the 'elapaio was observed, and his guidance followed in determining which side of the log to hollow out and while to use as the outside of the hull. Apparently, the kahuna might have to wait around for a long time -- even several days -- before the 'elapaio gave the desired indications.

A good omen (an 'elapaio)

Book Review: Building Outrigger Sailing Canoes

Building Outrigger Sailing Canoes
By Gary Dierking
International Marine, 2007
ISBN 9780071487917
$22.95
Review by Bob Holtzman

Gary Dierking is an American who has lived in New Zealand for many years. A skilled boat designer and builder, he has been fascinated by multihulls since his youth, and he has devoted much of his professional energies to catamarans, proas, outrigger canoes, and their ilk. While much of his work is, full custom, he also series-manufactures at least one outrigger canoe of his own design in composites (i.e., fiberglass).

In Building Outrigger Sailing Canoes, Dierking presents three of this own designs in full detail for amateur construction. These boats are:

• Ulua: A 17'9" Hawaiian-inspired design with a tacking rig for strip-plank construction


• T2: Also 17'9" and strip-planked, based on Micronesian canoes, with a variety of shunting sailing rigs


• Wa'apa: inspired by Hawaiian "three-board" canoes, and designed for stitch-and-glue plywood construction, she can be built as a 16-footer, a 24-footer, and/or in modular sections that allow the owner to switch back and forth between these two lengths with the inclusion or exclusion of a central 8' section between two 8' fore and aft sections.

These are beautiful boats, even the square-sided Wa'apa, but if your dream of the south Pacific includes floating idylls in calm lagoons with fruity alcohol drinks in a coconut shell, these boats won't do it for you. Looking at their lines, one can only conclude they are screamers: exciting craft that should keep any sailor on his toes and run rings around most sailboats twice their length.

Dierking includes complete building plans for all three boats in the book and, with its 8.5" x 11" format, reproduction is large enough (just) to build any of the designs right out of the book. (If your eyesight can't handle the size, or you want the greater precision that larger plans might allow, they are also available in larger formats from the author: http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/garyd/) The step-by-step explanation of the building procedures is concise and clear: so much so that one wonders why authors of other books on strip planking and stitch and glue construction need twice as much space to cover the same ground. Perhaps it's partly a function of Dierking's 3D how-to illustrations, generated in a drawing program and extraordinarily concise and clear in their own right: they reveal how the things go together more clearly than any number of 2D drawings and verbiage. This is one multi-skilled individual: he can design a boat; do the research on the cultural background; draw; write; and his workmanship as a boatbuilder is of a very high order.

The only thing that keeps me from being too envious is that I was his editor at International Marine (yes, this is the disclosure), and in that role, I do believe I considerably improved the book's organization. Indeed, I'm immensely proud of having helped bring this book into publication, for I feel it's one of the best boatbuilding books published within the past five years or so (I've read a few!). But the credit is the author's.

Of real importance is Dierking's presentation of numerous sailing rigs: several versions each of tacking rigs and shunting rigs, including an original, windsurfer-like shunting rig of Dierking's own design. (He calls it the Gibbons/Dierking rig, named for naturalist Euell Gibbons, but I feel he's being too modest. The rather crude rig that Gibbons designed provided only a bit of general direction to Dierking, and it suffered from tremendous weather helm. Dierking's version is really unique, perfectly balanced, and very sophisticated.) He gives the pros and cons of each rig type and provides useful guidance in how to sail a shunting rig -- something with which few Western sailors are familiar.

The boats are not simple -- they have a lot more bits and pieces than your average design for amateur construction of comparable displacement -- but none of the procedures are difficult. To build any of them, you will need a certain amount of dedication. They're also rather limited in their applications. For their length, they won't carry much, and they provide essentially no protection from the elements, so neither cold-weather sailing nor camp-cruising are really practical. But the benefits are numerous: they're beautiful; they're attention-getting (I think it would be impossible to take one off your roof rack and start assembling the components on the beach and not draw a crowd); and they're really, really fast.

Good book; good boats: very highly recommended.