A combination of wanting a new year challenge and a Christmas spent binge watching Tally Ho a wooden sailing yacht rebuild with some amazing craftsmanship and not a straight line in sight got me focussed on wanting to build something interesting. The weight of my plastic kayak and Brian extolling the lightness of a skin on frame kayak really tempted me, but were my woodworking skills up to it? I finally shamed myself into ordering the plans by informing everybody that I was building a kayak – no going back now.
With plans studied I confirmed I’d need the ability to cut long thin straight bits of timber. A table saw was ordered, something I’d wanted for ages, but never quite justified to myself. The saw was a revelation, with the ability to cut straight lines to a precise dimension the standard of my woodwork and the associated joy I could take from it increased significantly.
February – ordering timber
I spent a while researching timber. Being an engineer I’ve written and been on the receiving end of many specifications tightly defining an object. The organic nature of timber, coupled with the complexities of timber specification methods made this feel complicated. What’s a board foot? How many knots are you likely to get in your boards?
I wasn’t sure where I could buy decent Canadian red cedar, or a suitable alternative locally so eventually plumped for buying on line at timbersource.co.uk. It seemed expensive but there website made it feel accessible, coupled with an email exchange confirming that they could supply 14 feet as a single length. This meant I could happily ignore their website disclaimer “We may supply in more than one length to achieve your length requirement” .
A few weeks later a long thin parcel arrived at my front door, an unlikely looking kayak self build kit of the cedar and some green oak. Careful unpacking and inspection suggested I could get most of the lengths almost knot free. The weight difference between the two types of timber was remarkable.
March – preparation
There seemed to be lots of prep before I could start on the build. I needed to complete, or atleast get to a usable state, the workbench I had started for my cabinet saw.
Having done this I obsessed over how I was going to rip my beautiful 14’ planks to the correct width. My solution, some home built rollers mounted on my saw horses, plus infeed/out feed extensions to the saw bench
The rollers were a little novel, but worked well, 32mm plastic pipe mounted on top of a length of broom handle
My daughter’s birthday intervened. She was wanting some tropical fish and liked the idea of me building her a custom cabinet to stand the newly acquired aquarium on. Several hours over a few weekends saw the cabinet finished with the fish tank mounted on top.
2nd April – ripping the cedar
After all the distractons, finally it was time to start cutting the actual timber. With the motto, measure twice, cut once going through my head, my next little headache was the fractional inches used in the plans. My digital callipers could cope with decimal millimetres or inches but not the 8’ths and 16th’s of the plans. The solution I mostly adopted was to convert to millimeters. The additional benefit, for me, was a better understanding of the tolerance and accuracies I was actually achieving.
The next job was planing the timber to thickness. Whilst a thickness planer was on my wants list I certainly couldn’t justify another large tool to myself just yet. A trip to my work colleagues workshop with a roof rack of timber carefully attached to use his thicknesses solved the problem – thanks Paul!
Easter – cutting the mortices
The next step was marking out for the mortices in the gunwhales. I carefully marked them out following all the tips in Brian’s video, only to land a mortise in the worst imperfection in the timber right at the end. A few minutes thinking and the problem was solved by flipping around what I was calling the bow and stern in my timber, and remarking them.
Prior to actually cutting the mortices I spent a while building many of the forms and jigs. The risk of messing up my expensive carefully cut timber was high on my mind and put off for a while, plus I’d need the jigs anyway.
Although my router has a decent fence I’d often in the past had problems with it not quite sitting flat or moving out of line slightly whilst cutting the mortise messing up the mortise. The need to cut 50 plus mortises without screwing up felt daunting. I found the the suggested combination of a bigger base plus double fences minimised the chance of a wobble. The upcut router 1/4” bit advised by Brian made for very clean rib mortises cut in a couple of passes.
The wider deck mortises were the next challenge. I couldn’t justify the cost of another cutter and the router jig for the angled ones looked fiddly. With a bit of care, some offset passes with my 1/4 inch cutter solved the perpendicular ones needed for the curved deck beams and I drilled the angled ones for the straight deck beams using a drill guide block jig made from some hardwood. I got the idea of how to make sure the jig was exactly 65degrees from a YouTube video… these mortices weren’t quite as tidy, but with some careful cleaning passable.
It was at the end of a long day carefully cutting mortices that I first took the step of bending the gunwhales into shape in the forms. Suddenly these two long straight pieces of timber with a load of mostly perpendicular cut mortices started to look, at least to my imagination, like a boat with its 3D curved sides and sheer. My boat kit was taking form!
Laminating the deck beams
The next weekend was eagerly anticipated. No Saturday morning lay-ins for me, it was out in my garage or as I now started to call it, my boat shed. The laminations were cut for the deck beams and glued and shaped around the former. I didn’t have enough clamps so needed to do one at a time. This approach also allowed for a slightly simpler two position former than the three position former included in the plans.
I hadn’t used Gorilla glue before and applied a little too much glue on the first one. Watching the glue squeeze out expand out of the cracks was fun but took a little while to clean up. The gently curved result looked great.
Steam bending – take 1
The next day I also had my first go at steam bending the coaming from my green oak. I cut a couple of sets from the cleanest, knot free section I could see, and then shaped the tapered ends with my newly purchased power planer. All these tasks were made much doable with the video instructions. I got a bit fed up having to rewatch them multiple times to extract out all the key bits of info. For this type of ‘skimming’ I prefer written instructions with diagrams but the video instructons do go into a fantastic level of detail.
The timber wasn’t perfect and had it started to dry out too much? I spent a while setting up and rehearsing the assembly procedure. I could see that with the rapid cooling, Brian’s insistence on quick precision was important and a slower, more muddled approach wouldn’t work.
I had fun setting up the steamer I’d picked up from a community website. On the first attempt I hadn’t got a timber batten under the entire plastic drain piple and it soon started to deform. With a little extra timber I avoided any major sag.
Take one went pretty well to begin with. The belt stopped any major splintering around the tight bend but then l felt a slight snap and tear out as I formed the ends. I ignored it and carried on forming the ends. Before leaving it to cool I tried to correct the slight snap with some more glue and clamping
It looked a reasonable first attempt, nicely symmetrical but as well as the snap I realised I had put the tapered ends together the wrong way around. If that was the only flaw I might have been able to live with it but ideally I wanted to do better.
Steam bending – take 2
The next day saw the next attempt. My coamings stock was longer than needed which allowed me to place the slightly dodgy bit at a different point in the coamings. By placing it along the one straighter side perhaps I would have more luck?
Learning from my previous mistake I managed to shape and glue together the next one the correct way around with no nasty snapping sounds. However the dodgy bit caused a lack of symmetry – rather disturbing to my eye. I tried a little more clamping but it didn’t really help.
Oh well, two attempts, both slightly flawed but in two very different ways. I was getting closer to the knot on my stock causing the issue so a third attempt with this timber felt futile. I lamented that if I could choose the best half of each together it would be perfect, but that option wasn’t open to me.
I put the comings to one side – perhaps with time I would come up with a solution.
On the flip side I still had a sense of amazement that it’s possible to take a perfectly straight bit of timber and bend it into a complete 360 degree circle.
22nd April – Joining the gunwhales
The next step was shaping the gunwhale ends, kerfing them, lashing them and finally pegging them together. The lashings were fun. I first learnt how to lash things together as a young Scout. I remember spending days as a kid building a model of the Kon Ticki raft and winning a prize in the craft section of a local show. The techniques had been useful many times since, but only for temporary roughly assembled things, not for something ‘proper’.
Next step was cutting the tenons in the deck beams with my little Japanese saw. Taking it slowly, following Brian’s bit by bit instructions the whole process went well. The spacer block approach made dealing with the compound curves magically simple.
Overall I was pleased with how well the tennons fitted into the mortices. The curved beams fitted like a glove, the drilled mortices needed some trimming. The tension in the gunwales held them all together. A boat was starting to take shape.
May day bank holiday weekend – pegging the beams and cutting the ribs
My father who had long dabbled in furniture making as a hobby visited for weekend, curious to see what I was up to. My efforts to date passed his inspection and he helped me peg the beams into the gunnels, make the rib steam box and cut the ribs to size and prepare them for bending. I got a chance to demonstrate steam bending to him on a practice rib. This allowed me to get a feel for the cooking time needed – the rest would need to wait to the next weekend.
New kings coronation weekend – steam bending
With the rest of the UK glued to the TV, I escaped to my ‘boat shed’. I spent a while getting set up for the bending and going through dry runs of the process- their felt little room for error. I used an interval timer app to set the timings with a bong ever minute. Brian’s suggestion of taking a rib out every minute felt fast too me but his instructions had worked well so far so I went with it. With many things to remember I marked up the bending instructions for each rib on the gunwale – this was a great help during the process.
After lots of prep, steam box settled at the right temp I got started. Loading up the box one rib every minute there was no going back. After eight minutes the first one came out, quickly tightly bending it into a V, it then slotted into the mortises cleanly. The next one followed in rapid succession, not bending quite as cleanly as the first but okay. The fourth one snapped. Trying to keep Brian’s cool calm approach in my head I didn’t panic, at least it gave me a few seconds to breath.
Twenty minutes later the first round of ribs were all fitted, albeit with three snapped ribs. I cut to length and shaped the ends of the extras needed from my pre prepared rib stock ready for round two. I was conscious that ideally the keel and stringers needed to be fitted on the same day, so felt some pressure to keep moving. By lunch time all were fitted and I excitedly messaged my Dad, ‘all ribs in … a bit wonky, but by time the keel and stringers go on they should be okay’
Fitting the bow, stern and keel took a while. I hadn’t rounded over the edges of the keel or prepared my pegs so that ate into the afternoon. Similarly I hadn’t wound my thread onto a stick ready for lashing as prescribed by Brian.
The slightly wonky ribs meant I needed to use a couple of spacer blocks to keep the keel and stringers gently curving with a fair curve. Perhaps I was putting too many wraps in my lashings but I used a lot more artificial sinew than suggested.
It was getting late by the time I could temporary fit the stringers. It looked very different to first thing in the morning, obviously now a boat in the making, but the wonkiness was concerning.
May 13th and 14th – fixing the wonky ribs
Reflecting on the steaming process during the week it did seem the minute spacings suggested were a little too fast. The rib is only pliable for a ten or possibly 20 seconds so in a way why do you need longer? However it leaves little time for a beginner to assess the overall form and make corrections as you go. Perhaps this contributed to my wonkiness, perhaps it’s my unpracticed eye at assessing this type of thing. This was compounded by the desire to get the keel and stringers on in the same day. I understand the need for it but it removes some of the opportunity to stand back and assess the bigger picture.
Dwelling on either of these wasn’t going to fix the problem. Unleashing the keel, and removing it from the bow and stern stems, allowing me to remove the offending ribs didn’t feel appealing, especially as the keel was now pegged, making getting it back on cleanly, tricky.
I’d now finished watching all the back episodes of the Tally Ho build and had moved onto ‘From Acorn to Arrabella’. Unlike Tally Ho steam bending was used extensively on Arrabella, especially when problems were encountered planking the hull. It was a moment of inspiration when I realised I could possibly use a similar technique of in situ steaming on my boat, now called affectionately ‘das boat’ after the German submarine film.
With stringers removed and keel unlashed but kept clamped to some of the good stringers to help keep the desired shape I tried out my technique. According to Wikipedia, polythene melting point is 105 deg C. With steam at only 100, it meant I could loosely rap a piece of heavy duty bin bag around any offending rib and tape the ends together to form a tube. Placing the tube of my steam box right on the part of the rib I needed to correct allowed me to steam just the approrpriate bit. After two minutes of steaming, the oak softened up nicely and became pliable again. Wearing gloves it was fairly easy to manipulate the rib into a better shape and clamp it back to the keel, forcing it to, mostly, keep the desired shape.
A few hours later and everything was looking not quite perfect, but much much better allowing me, with some relief, to relash the keel and fit the stringers without the need of spacer blocks.
The rest of the build
Having lost the original write up text, I suspect it’s saved ‘in the cloud’ somewhere, whether its the Apple one, Microsoft one or even on an old fashioned local hard disk I haven’t a clue, so this last section has been re-written well after the build and boats maiden voyage.
With the frame together, after tidying up and finishing of a few bits it was great to put a coat of oil on it. With hindsight I might have gone for a better quality oil than the cheapest furniture oil sold by our local big box store, which I think left some residues eventually staining the fabric in a few places.
A break from the build
I then had a break from boat building for a family holiday where I did manage to fit in a little very enjoyable sea kayaking along the spectacular Welsh coast.
On my return I completed the coaming, first straitening out the asymmetry in the one piece with some ‘secondary streaming and clamping, and then adding the coaming lip. Adding the lip took a couple of attempts, the first steaming failed due to not quite being organised enough on getting the cooked timber out of the steam box and bending it quickly.
Due to some imperfections in how the scarfed ends of the coaming joined together I actually used a third piece steamed in around the back to reinforce the joints. After it was all nailed together it looked pretty good and felt like it should do the job.
Skinning the boat
With the woodworking pretty much finished it was time to turn my attention to the skin. It took a little time sourcing the materials. Importing from the US seemed expensive but figuring out what other materials were available in the UK and how they would behave in process when I didn’t have a good feeling for took a little working through.
I took the fitting of the fabric slowly, having little experience of needlework. Using the big zig zag shoe lace like stitches to tension the fabric around the boat, prior to sewing it up worked really well making everything drum tight and leaving just a few wrinkles along the deck. An adapted soldering iron (using a craft knife blade) worked pretty well as a hot knife.
I ended up using what I believe is the same fabric as recommended by Brian, purchased from Anthony Mace of Shipshape Boatbuilding in Bristol, thanks Anthony, using Coelan as the coating. The Coelan was eye wateringly expensive but did seem to come with lots of recommendations.
Going to bed the night after carefully sewing up the long seam behind the cockpit I was surprised how painful my shoulders were. I’m pretty sure it was due to being hunched over the boat carefully stitching for several hours
I was in two minds over if to dye the boat, and if so what colour. I eventually dyed it yellow using an acid die, although I’m not sure this was my best choice and if I was to do another may choose to keep it clear, although I did wonder if this would get grubby in time.
It was now time to add the goop and make the thing waterproof – hopefully. Carefully donning a mask on a hot summers day I applied several coats of Colene. The biggest issue I had was that the yellow dye attracted multiple bugs, with the goop forcing the boat skin to become there final resting home, resulting in a slightly speckled black appearance. The residue from the oil also showed through. Whilst not the most spectacular finish it definitely looked like a kayak, it was now time to see if it floated.
Preparing for the launch
People had asked about how I was going to launch it, joking that I should have champagne launch. Instead, after strapping it the first time to the car on its side in the way I had understood Brian had recommended, I opted for something far more discrete going quietly to a familiar picturesque spot on the local river.
The initial getting into the boat didn’t go well, the boat being far more tippy than I was used to. I found myself taking a short swim. Soon however I was settling into the boat taking my first tentative strokes. A couple of minutes later I was enjoying it. It was much speedier than my plastic boat and pretty manoeuvrable.
I took a few trips along our local river. The boat is an absolute joy to carry to the river, getting in and out a little more challenging than my ultra stable plastic kayak. The tracking isn’t quite perfect, but acceptable. Whilst in studying some of my build photos I can definitely see a kink in the keel. I suspect this is the cause of the issue.
I also had some problems fitting the boat to my roof bars and almost had a catastrophic accident as it came loose whilst driving. Fortunately i was only moving slowly and I managed to stop quickly to reattach it. Following this incident I quickly purchased some J bars for a much more robust fixing.
A longer journey
It was now time to try something a little more adventurous. Last year I had kayaked a 30 mile stretch of the river Wye, one of the longer UK free flowing rivers including a few grade 1 and 2 sections with many places along its banks to hire canoes from. I was keen to paddle the next section and possibly even make it to the sea.
On a wonderful late summer, early autumn weekend, after gathering my tent and overnight camping gear I loaded the kayak onto my new J bars and made my way to Hereford. Six wonderful hours of kayaking later I was 28 river miles downriver feeling a little tired setting up my tent at Ross on Wye rowing club before watching a great sunset.
The next day was misty as I set off towards my sisters in Monmouth, 18 miles further down the river.
Quickly the sun burnt off the early morning mist and I made my way past the Symond’s Yat rocks.
The day involved the artificially enhanced Simonds Yat grade two rapids just below the tourist honey trap village of the same name. Being pretty much a self taught kayaker having done very little ‘white water’ before and now with my new boat, I was in two minds over if to bypass the rapids or not.
I stopped on the large quiet area of water just above the rapids watching the hire canoeists as they dared each other to shoot the rapids. Whilst I couldn’t see exactly how they got on, they all seemed to make it safely, plus my boat had up well to any submerged rocks so far.
Altogether I felt like I had little excuse to not give it a go, or if I did bypass it, I would always live in regret….. a short while later I was at the bottom feeling exhilarated with no obvious damage.
I set of for the last stretch to Monmouth arriving in time for Sunday lunch. A great end to a wonderful journey. Whilst there were a few scratches on the hull after the long paddle in a boulder strewn river with low water levels it had stood up to the abuse pretty well with no leaks.
What next?
Driving home that evening it was now time to think what to do next after this rewarding project. My woodworking skills have come on massively, creating the sweeping curves of a boat enthral me and my confidence levels at taking on projects needing new skills have risen dramatically. So far it has included carving a Greenland style paddle and more recently undertaking a strip-planked surf-ski build.
October 8, 2023
Hi Lewis, As your nearest CFK F1 building neighbour, I thought I’d make contact and say hello. It’s been a while since your last post; how’s it going? You could be finished and on the water by now but, then again, I know life has a way of upsetting plans. Here in Norfolk, my frame’s very nearly finished, with just the deck stringers to add. I have my skin fabric and coating standing ready. I hope you are well.