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CAPE FALCON STUDENT BUILDS

Blog your build is a new way to share your build, get connected with other Cape Falcon Kayak owners and builders, and save some money at the same time.

Bloggers still purchase the online building course, but receive their plans for free. In exchange, every time they build, they post some photos and comments about their progress, along with an initial paddling impression and another one 6 months later.

If you’d like to join us and post your build, you can learn more here.

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capefalconbuilds

Does anyone in my feed know anything about old Toy

Does anyone in my feed know anything about old Toyota Diesel engines? I’m thinking about buying this imported van and I need some advice. Update: It has the 2.8 3L non turbo engine, about 180,000 km on it, and it had a blown head gasket from an overheating episode that killed the head.
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For health reasons I need to get somewhere much warmer for the winter and I need to be able to bring boats with me so I can work. I was just gonna pack us like sardines into the jeep Cherokee and head for Mexico but speaking from experience it’s not easy to live out of a Cherokee for months on end.
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Unfortunately I’m one of those people that actually needs 4lo so that really narrows my options.
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There’s no way in heck I could afford a transit with a conversion and I would never buy a sprinter even if I could afford it so that really pushes me towards these imported Japanese vans which are insanely overpriced right now but I found one that’s actually not too bad. (yes I’m aware they go 40 on the hills).
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I spent some time driving it and everything functions really well except for one issue: it overheated and blew its head gasket 10,000 miles ago and had a new head put on everything done professionally by a shop that specializes in this. A diesel mechanic already looked at it and passed on it because he said it was losing a little bit of compression on one cylinder. (Runs smooth and sounds great)
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It’s consuming about a quart of oil every 4000 miles. So here’s my question, how bad is this and what does it mean for the life of the engine? If I drive this thing with a heavy load for six months in the middle of nowhere but keep it from overheating is this a big deal that’s going to get worse or is it something that could just stay like this forever? My diesel E350 burned that same amount but I know that’s comparing apples to oranges. I’m a boat guy not an engine guy so if you actually know anything about these things, please leave a comment.

(read that again: actually know anything about these things, not “ I changed the oil on my minivan in the 90s but let me give you a detailed speculative answer anyways!”)
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Thanks!!
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#vanlife #adventurevan #hiace #dieselengine

“Hey Brian...hope you are well! I've finally had

“Hey Brian...hope you are well! I've finally had a chance to give the canoe a fishing outing today. THE CANOE IS AWESOME!!! Thank you for everything and I cannot be more happy. I spent 5.5 hours and almost 9 miles in the back country marsh. No fish caught today but that's fishing. Today was a suboptimal day with tide and 10 to 15 mph winds in my face and I was smiling!”
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Check out this canoe built by Bart to fly fish in the salt marshes of Florida. At 14’ long x 28” wide, this might be the most versatile boat in our entire lineup. (Our building system will make anything from a 19 pound pack canoe to a full size tripping tandem.)
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Being on the smaller side, it’s a quick, easy build that ends up weighing about 24 pounds. (26 if you set it up as a solo). It makes a great little solo for a smaller person and a medium size person can use it as either a small solo or a larger double paddle canoe, and it still floats a large person just fine as a double paddle canoe. I guess the best way to describe it is “handy”, which might be the best compliment you can give a boat because handy boats get used!
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#skinonframecanoe #canoefishing #handbuilt #66canoe #skinonframe #buildyourownboat #mycapefalconbuild

Ribbing a larger size version of the same boat tha

Ribbing a larger size version of the same boat that I ribbed a few days ago so I can splice together the best teaching from both videos.
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It’s always a little weird that bending the ribs only takes about 25 minutes, but editing the video takes about two days!
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#steambending #kayakbuilding #woodbending #woodworking #instructionalvideos #videoproduction #inthestudio #boatbuilding #smallboat #kayak #skinonframekayak

For this latest rib bending video I took a differe

For this latest rib bending video I took a different approach, I started off rusty, having not bent a kayak in about six months, and used some old, dried out rib stock.
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The idea here was to mimic the student experience where I would end up making some mistakes and then make a second video for how to fix them.
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I’ve never had much difficulty making mistakes so it turned out like I had hoped and we had a handful of common issues that I then fixed on camera at the end. Here I’m bending a replacement rib in the center of the kayak where one of the bends was just a bit too slack.
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#steambending #bendingwood #bendingoak #woodworking #kayakbuilding #boatbuilder #traditionaltechniques #woodenboat #kayak #skinonframe #woodworkingtips #boatbuildingtips

How the sausage is made. Re-shooting the steam ben

How the sausage is made. Re-shooting the steam bending video for my F1 Kayak design. The existing videos are fine, I’m just kind of obsessed with making this particular part of the building course as perfect as possible.
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#steambending #bendingwood #boatbuilding #kayakbuilding #skinonframekayak #videoinstruction #timelapse #woodenboat #kayak #buildyourownboat #woodworkingproject #diyproject #behindthescenes

Digging through old photos I found this ridiculous

Digging through old photos I found this ridiculous contraption that actually worked pretty well. Last year I built a triple nesting set of canoes with the smaller two being solos and the larger one being mostly just a UV protection cover for the other two.
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I built rowing rigs for all three of them because Liz prefers to row and a couple of my normal pop up sails because I prefer doing nothing.
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One day when we were about to take out the largest canoe I grabbed a handful of sheet rock screws and a block of scrap wood and screwed it on to the middle of the rowing set up and then drilled a hole right down the middle of it with the idea that I could just drop the mast from the other pop up sail right into it and double our propulsion.
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I’d already tried something similar on solo canoes and it just turned out to be a maddeningly frustrating contraption, but at least for a mellow evening cruise in light winds this micro schooner scooted along smartly and earned us a thumbs up from every boat we passed!
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#skinonframe #skinonframecanoe #sailing #smallboat #woodenboat #schooner #paddling #boat #boating

Slicing up some gorgeous bending oak from @zenafor

Slicing up some gorgeous bending oak from @zenaforestproducts to send overseas with my kayak building kits. I don’t sell bending oak domestically anymore because people can order it a lot cheaper from @jwswanandsons (or pick some up in person from Zena), but I’m happy to put it in the kits that we send overseas to save on what would otherwise be a massive separate shipping cost. These ribs are going to Australia where bending wood is hard to come by.
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I’ve been cutting my bending oak for a while now with a thin kerf circular saw blade in the tablesaw. This increases the yield by about 25% and lets me do this on an under powered saw. I can’t say for certain but as far as I can tell I think this is safe, but I wouldn’t do it on anything thicker than 1 1/4, I’m cutting wet wood which is a lot softer, I take the blade out every 50 ribs to clean the gunk off, and I only cut about 200 ribs before I put a fresh blade on. (It’s 10 bucks don’t be a cheapskate!)
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Anytime you’re mass producing small parts on a tablesaw the risks go up. Just like with boating my approach to safety is to focus more on judgment and technique than building a cage of safety features that may or may not work as intended. Thats just me though.
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Appropriately powered saw/blade combo
Zero clearance insert
New blade
Safety glasses
Never gloves
Stand out of the way
Keep firm control of the wood
Use a push stick
Push all the way through
Use the push stick to move the offcut
Never reach around to grab the rib
Don’t cut tired, stay focused
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23 years, 10 fingers still, only one serious accident (workpiece exploded during normal cutting operations. So scary. Safety glasses saved my eye.)
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#woodworkingtools #woodworkingtips

Last bit of footage from the Surprise Lake trip, t

Just a couple sailing clips from the foggy morning

Just a couple sailing clips from the foggy morning we spent on that high mountain lake a few weeks ago.
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Not a lot of sailing to be done on a lake that’s about as wide as a football field, but the pop-up sail is simple enough that it’s practical to snatch every little puff.
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#canoesailing #smallboat #canoe #canoeing #skinonframecanoe

One interesting thing about skin on frame boat bui

One interesting thing about skin on frame boat building that’s completely different than almost every other type of woodworking is that it’s actually beneficial to do sloppy work. This makes it both faster and more beginner friendly.
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In normal boat or furniture building, sloppy joints allow for a bit of flexing that slowly becomes a lot of flexing and eventually causes damage and failure.
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In a skin boat on the other hand a bit of flexing is unavoidable because of the tremendous forces of the boat moving over waves. In this case a slightly loose joint helps to dissipate forces that would otherwise lead to damage in perfectly tight joints. This is another reason we don’t glue anything.
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Here I’m burning through the rib mortises for a kayak with a plunge router. There’s probably an eighth of an inch of variation in mortise length. No worries!
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#skinonframe #kayakbuilding #boatbuilding #woodworking #mortising #plungerouter #joinery

On my website there is a FREE 15 hour Skin on Fram

On my website there is a FREE 15 hour Skin on Frame Kayak Prep Course that shows all of the hyper-efficient prep task systems I developed to be able to teach 6 people to build 6 kayaks in 6 days, for 15 years straight. I put this out for free as a way to give back to the community, but also as a way to let prospective students get familiar with the scope of the project and my online teaching style before they spend any money. I’d rather sell fewer small boat plans if it means that more of them actually get turned into boats on the water.
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This is my fast, simple method for laminating curved deck beams for my kayaks. I sped it up by 30% just so it would fit inside of a minute but it’s pretty close to real time.
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Of course the details matter, and just like everything there’s zillion little tips that make the difference between doing it once, or doing it over!
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#skinonframekayak #kayakbuilding #woodworking #lamination #woodworkingtips #boatbuilding #boatbuildingtips

The easy way to make beads for the deck lines on a

The easy way to make beads for the deck lines on a Greenland Kayak. A drill with a slightly tapered dowel and an angle grinder with a 36 grit sanding wheel. I’m using high density polyethylene here but this also works well with ivory, it just smells a lot worse.
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I generally don’t make toggles or beads out of bone because they deteriorate quickly, which is why it was seldom used on actual traditional kayaks.
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#traditionalkayak #decklines #kayakbuilder #boatbuilder #greenlandkayak

Just some random canoe porn while I work on less e

Just some random canoe porn while I work on less exciting things. The location is Surprise Lakes in the Gifford Pinchot national forest. Rolling up in the jeep to this easy access, idyllic lakeside campground, we were like: “why is there no one else here?!”.
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Answer: because they’ve all been eaten by the locust-like swarms of bloodthirsty mosquitos. Surprise!
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I attribute the significant gains that I made on my C-stroke that weekend to my desperate need to move as fast as I could away from those little monsters. Any second I wasn’t inside the tent or paddling as fast as I could on the lake I was just shouting and slapping and flailing my arms like a crazy person.
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Ah, nature….
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#canoeing #canoe #boatporn #skinonframe

We just posted a new video on the Cape Falcon YouT

We just posted a new video on the Cape Falcon YouTube channel showing all the testing we’ve been doing with the latest solo. Being my last canoe build for 2021 I made sure to pack this video with design info and tons of eye candy.
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As usual I’m not sure that I’m the best person to evaluate the performance of my designs, but from a subjective point of view, I really like paddling this latest generation of boats.
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Looking ahead to the future, to push these designs to the next level I’m probably gonna have to get a lot of on the water, in person, feedback from serious soloists, so I’ve been toying with the idea of building a fresh pair and taking them on the road for a month or two next spring.
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Equally as important though is to start drilling down into the tandems. I’m just starting to get the first reports of really “good” tandems built with our system, and there’s a couple student boats I’d like to reproduce to see how I feel in them.
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As always thank you to everyone who takes the course and builds one of these boats. From a design perspective the sheer volume of iteration allows me to evolve the designs so much faster then if it was just me building boats. Anyway, bounce over to YouTube if that interests you and enjoy the video!
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#canoeing #canoedesign #skinonframecanoe #skinonframe #mycapefalconbuild #66canoe #boatbuilding #woodworking #canoebuilding

I’ve been trying to do more filming with the @go

I’ve been trying to do more filming with the @gopro lately, playing around with solo filming and trying to get more interesting shots. It’s cool to bring people along from my point of view.
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I bought the hero 7 black as a dedicated time lapse camera for a non-boat related project a few years ago but I haven’t really used it that much because to be perfectly honest, it is buggy A.F. I’m constantly having to pull the battery out to reset it’s brain when it freezes. I don’t know if I just got a bad one or if they were all like that?
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If you can get past that aspect of things though it’s actually a pretty amazing little camera. Pretty durable, good color rendition, multiple field of view choices, time lapse lapse and slow motion options, decent on the auto settings, surprisingly good audio for what it is, astonishing stabilization, and the option to add on screen gauges for various motion metrics if you’re willing to suffer through GoPro‘s still not very good editing software as a preliminary step to whatever real editing program you have.
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Aside from the issue of it constantly freezing on me it seems pretty incredible for a video camera that’s half the size of a stick of butter. I wonder if the newer ones are less glitchy?
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#gopro #hero7black #adventurevideo #outdoorvideo

I’m watching the flooding in Western Europe righ

I’m watching the flooding in Western Europe right now and thinking about how a couple weeks ago it was 117 DEGREES at my house in Portland Oregon. Climate change is happening but there’s still a massive disconnect between the current scientific understanding, policy response, and public perception of that science.
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It’s a hard thing to communicate because the actual facts sound hyperbolic. We are no longer facing a choice of whether or not to stop climate change, but rather a choice between a future that is going to devastating, and a future where we might go extinct as a species.
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I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about this until recently because to my best understanding we just didn’t have the technology available to address the problem. Sure we could tinker around the edges and pat ourselves on the back for it, but there was no real way to get from where we are to where we actually need to be.
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Recently I’ve been revisiting the subject, devouring boring technical podcasts on the subject, and shockingly we actually do have the technology to make the clean energy transition.
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The bad news is that for it to work it has to start happening right now, simultaneously all over the world, in a massive cooperative human endeavor that is completely unlike anything we’ve ever been able to do before.
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This isn’t something we fix by recycling or buying eco-friendly products, it needs to be driven by huge policy changes that are hard for me to imagine with democracies around the world disintegrating due to the changes in how get the information that we use to make our political choices.
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An MIT study that tracked thousands of stories over six years on social media determined that non-factual narratives now spread six times faster than factual ones which is just a giant Christmas present for demagogues who have always thrived on telling people what they want to hear as opposed to what’s actually true.
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So that’s what’s on my mind this morning. I don’t know how we look the next generation in the eye and explain how little we did to deal with this problem, but I also don’t know how much I can personally do to make a difference.
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#climatechange

I’m posting this Adirondack guide boat for sale

I’m posting this Adirondack guide boat for sale for a friend. He purchased this 16 foot guide boat new about 8 years ago and has only used it a couple times. It’s fiberglass with wood trim and I think it weighs about 70 pounds. He’s asking 4700 for it which is a pretty fair deal considering what these cost these days. Also it’s just kind of hard to get your hands on a small boat in general right now. So if anybody’s interested in this boat let me know and I’ll put you in touch. It’s located in Portland Oregon.
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For anybody who’s not familiar with them these are incredible little rowboats. The 16 footer easily handles two people with camping gear for a week. If I didn’t have six canoes and four kayaks right now I would be giving this serious consideration.
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#adirondackguideboat #rowing #rowboat

Check out the Cape Falcon Kayak YouTube Channel fo

Check out the Cape Falcon Kayak YouTube Channel for the full version of this lovely little video I stitched together from our time testing the latest solo on the upper John Day river.
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For technical reasons natural audio isn’t usually usable but it seemed to work out this time so I just let nature do the talking. Enjoy.
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#solocanoe #riverrunning #river #66canoe #skinonframecanoe

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Brian Schulz
brian@capefalconkayaks.com
Call or text: 503 354 4939

4935 NE 11th Avenue
Portland, Oregon 97211
Hours by appointment only

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