Andy’s F1, Vancouver Washington

This blog is intended to reassure potential builders of the likelihood you’ll make a great kayak and have fun doing it even if it’s your first build and your work doesn’t quite live up to your hopes and standards. Brian Shultz’ instructional materials are thorough and easy to follow, and his design had the resilience to overcome my errors and limitations; it’s not overly persnickety where it doesn’t need to be or where it would require exceptional abilities.

I built an F1 following Brian’s plans and videos. In the process I flubbed some things and had to re-do or compensate for them. My bad, oh well. And notably, I had to make my ribs from kiln-dried white oak instead of green oak.

The Executive Summary is that I had a lot of fun in the process; it was enjoyable and really gratifying. I wound up with a beautiful light, fast and straight tracking boat despite my errors and the sub-optimal rib material.

I will recount my challenges here for other builders. They were:

Using kiln-dried white oak for my ribs.
Adding ¼” thick slabs to the outsides of the gunnels and secondary stringers to make up for gunnels Id planed too thin. I didn’t discover this problem till very late in the process, after I’d glued on the secondary stringers
I had to shim about a half-dozen rib contacts with the keel and stringers. Some of these were to raise the stringers at the stern to lift the fabric off the ribs. Part of this problem was due to twisted wonkiness of some of the kiln-dried ribs I bent and decided to keep anyway, and part due to aggressively cutting the rolling bevel on the secondary stringers.
The stem wound up angled to port by about 1/8” so I planed it back to symmetry.

Again, these were all recoverable errors on my part which did not notably affect the quality of the boat.

Apart from this couple of issues, everything was done according to Brian’s instructions and worked out as he’d forecast. I won’t try the reader’s patience discussing processes that Brian explains better in his instructions.

Working with kiln-dried white oak ribs

I had to use kiln-dried white oak for my ribs. Following Brian’s PDF guide to using dried wood, I cut about 50 pieces of rib stock from a clear quarter-sawn 8’ 2×10 white oak plank. Almost all of the rib stock seemed to me to conform to Brians guidelines on grain orientation. I soaked the ribs in water with a little fabric softener for 2 weeks before steaming and bending. My steam box is almost exactly like the one Brian demonstrates, with a wallpaper steamer for steam. Since this was my first time bending wood, while I waited for the white oak to soak I cut some green 2×4 stock into rib dimensions and tried steam bending that. I steamed, bent and broke about twenty green fir ribs, testing different steam times. Every fir rib broke but I gained useful experience with the whole process.

In contrast to failures with the green fir, I did succeed in steaming and bending kiln-dried white oak for the ribs. Of the 50 or so ribs I cut, about 30 ribs (60%) of the kiln-dried white oak either broke or wound up wonky, but I got the 20 ribs needed for the boat, so hey. A few of the strongly bent ribs toward the stern still have an awkward twist in them, so that there is an ~1/8” gap between one edge of the rib and the keel and/or a stringer. (this is part of the reason why I had to shim ribs in the stern). I thinned the foremost two ribs down to ¼” to get them to bend properly, after breaking a couple at 17/64”. The process of steaming and bending wood and finishing with all those ribs tenoned into the gunnels was extremely gratifying. The ~60% failure rate of the kiln-dried white oak ribs didn’t bother me after the 100% failure rate of my green fir ribs, especially since I was able to get all 20 ribs out of that one plank anyway.

Adding ¼” slabs to the gunnels to bring them up to (and beyond) proper thickness

I planed my gunnels too thin (9/16” instead of 11/16”), a full 1/8” too thin. I blame excessive exuberance with a freshly restored and sharpened jack plane. Only after I’d completed the frame did I realize my mistake. I wrote to Brian, and he advised me to glue a 1/8” strip onto the outside of the gunnel to bring the thickness back up to 11/16”. In an extravagant display of generosity, I doubled the thickness of my strip from Brian’s 1/8” to ¼”, and gorilla-glued it on the outside of the gunnel. That brought the thickness up to 13/16”, a full 1/8” thicker than he’d suggested. Since the secondary stringers were already glued on before I added the ¼” slabs, I glued a ¼” strip to the outside of those too, in order to maintain the relative height of the secondary stringers above the gunnels. It all glued up nicely. Because my strips were a little thicker, the gunnels wind up being 13/16” thick instead of 11/16”, so the boat is ¼” wider at the gunnels than designed.

Shimming the ribs

I had to shim some of the ribs toward the stern, partly because ribs 18 and 19 were twisted and wonky, but also because I may have planed the rolling bevels on the stringers too aggressively. (This time, excessive exuberance with a newly restored and sharpened block plane.) The bow and stern ends are cut back to the diagonal line that bisects the end.

Figure 1: aggressive rolling bevel on the end of one stringer.

This makes for a thinner stringer, easier to bend and lash onto the ribs, but if the stringer were thicker (less material removed from the bevel at the ends of the stringer) it would stand higher up and provide more space between the skin and the curve of the ribs at the bow and stern. A 1/8” thicker stringer here might have kept the fabric off the ribs better in the stern. As it was, several ribs would have touched the skin between the keel and stringers on the stern of the boat. I had to place several shims between the ribs and stringers near the stern to keep the ribs from touching the skin. I was a little concerned that the extra ¼” stringer depth required to keep the cloth off the ribs could affect the handling somehow. However, the stringer heights are as given in the F1 plans.

The keel also needed shims at several of the ribs that didn’t bend close enough to the keel or were twisted and wonky. I shimmed the keel on ribs # 18, 19 and 20 (the last three ribs), the port side of the stringer on ribs #18, 19 and 20, and on the starboard stringer on #20.

Planing the stern stem to bring it back into true.

After I’d lashed on the keel and pegged it to the stem and stern I realized I’d forgotten to soften the keel edges. I cut off the lashes, sawed through the pegs, softened the edges of the keel and lashed it back on again, gluing and pegging it to the stem and stern. The second set of lashings was tighter and better than the first set. I took this opportunity to steam and replace one or two wonky ribs, too. However, I was insufficiently attentive to the straightness of the stern stem when I pegged it, and the stern stem wound up angled to port with respect to the keel. The offset was about 1/8” at the aft edge of the lower edge of the stem behind the keel. After consideration I planed off just under 1/8” of the trailing edge of the port side of the stem to make the stem symmetric with respect to the keel. I feathered the planing of the stem, so the lower part is shaved off but the upper part abaft the gunnel is unchanged.

Figure 2: stern stem angled towards the port side. Later, I shaved off some wood on the port side to make the two sides symmetrical.

Figure 3: showing 1/8″ deflection of stern stem towards the port side, before planing.

Figure 4: After planing the port side of the stern stem. Although the photo doesn’t show it clearly, the two sides are now tapered equally toward the centerline, reducing the stern’s angle toward port.

Figure 5: showing area planed off the port side of the stern stem to make it symmetrical with the starboard side.

This fix seems to have worked. At any rate, the kayak goes straight. Any asymmetry in its travel is subtle and might have more to do with my own ergonomics than the boat. Nevertheless, if I had to do it over again I think the more elegant repair would have been to have cut the keel off the stern stem again and refastened it instead of planing it down.

In Figure 6 the ¼” reinforcing strip on the outside of the gunnels is visible as a lighter-colored strip than the gunnel itself. You can see that I also glued blocks into the inside corners of each of the deck beams to give me more options on screw locations for deck fastenings. Also in this photo there are three rear deck beams, the central one of which is not in the plans. I later removed it, realizing it got in the way of the coaming.

Figure 6: the frame before skinning.

The boat is really nice. It is light, fast and tracks well. I followed Brian’s instructions and was able to keep all aspects of the construction within his parameters except for the issues I noted here: using kiln-dried white oak for my ribs, adding ¼” thick slabs to the outsides of the gunnels and secondary stringers to make up for gunnels I’d planed too thin, shimming about a half-dozen rib contacts with the keel and stringers, planing back an angled stem.

In aggregate, these issues do not seem to have affected the boats performance or appearance.

I think this attests to the resilience of Brian’s F1 design. It can tolerate at least these deviations with no apparent loss of performance. Potential F1 builders might be encouraged by this example of a boat built imperfectly but winding up as a very, very nice kayak.

Finally, I had a vast amount of fun building the F1. I was motivated by the opportunity to learn and practice the skills of steam bending, lashing and sewing most of all; the fact that I wound up with a boat I love and which suits my needs was not my primary goal, but it is a huge bonus.