The Dash Point Pirate

Warren Williamson's name invoked to sell kayak

Check out the ad I found on Craigslist: 

Very fast kayak, made by master carpenter. Aleutian Island-style baidarka. Western red cedar, and yellow Alaskan cedar. Skin-on-frame. Tracks well. Thirty and a half pounds. Fifteen feet two inches long. Twenty-two inch beam (width). Did I say fast? 

Warren Williamson said, "That is the nicest baidarka I have ever seen." (Check out Warren's videos where he's kayaking in whirlpools in Deception Pass, on Utube.)

Apparently now that Warren Williamson has achieved celebrity status after appearing on This Is The Sea 4 people are trying to make a little money off of him.  Yes, the US economy is that bad.  

Well I guess I can get into the act too.  Stay tuned for my This is Warren mugs that I'm going to start selling in my Cafe Press Store.  You'll find it next to the Dubside/Quivitok mug that I'm going to put back up on the shelves after several years of keeping it under wraps.  You'll also be able to buy an ersatz Shepard Fairey Dubside sticker (all proceeds go to pay to Dubside's bus fare).

Rick Semple's Skin-On-Frame Kayak

Ricardo has been guiding Rick Semple though building a skin-on-frame kayak.  He wrote the following article for the Bates Technical Institute newsletter, then they took the frame to the Bates Boatbuilding program to skin and waterproof it.   

"When Rick Semple, a Tacoma businessman and photographer, thought about how close he lived to the new public launch site for human-powered craft at the end of the Thea Foss waterway, he began to think about building a boat. An avowed artist with a little time on his hands but no prior experience in boatbuilding, Semple turned to a graduate of the Bates Boatbuilding program and advisory board member, Richard Lovering, to teach him the intricacies of building a kayak. At Semple’s own pace, he and Lovering, would design and build a Greenland kayak to launch before spring for use in Commencement Bay.

"Skin-on-frame kayak building is something of a regional specialty in the Pacific Northwest, where Harvey Golden, author of a definitive work on Greenland kayaks, and George Dyson, author of authoritative scholarly papers on the Aleut baidarka (the distinctive West Coast kayak), live and work. Tacoma is the home of SSTIKS, the South Sound Traditional Inuit Kayak Society, which has an annual skin-on-frame symposium on the Hood Canal, attended by afficionados from all over the world. Lovering learned skin-on-frame building at Bates where Chuck Graydon, a student of native American boatbuilding and builder of an umiak used in a Bellingham Youth program, taught him how to fit the kayak design for the individual paddler in terms of height, weight, and level of expertise. 

"First, the paddler is measured, sitting as if in the boat-to-be. Then a cedar and oak frame is constructed around those measurements so that, when finished, the kayak will fit the paddler like a piece of clothing. Metal fastenings and glue are used sparingly if at all in the frame: members are lashed to each other with waxed dacron “sinew” or pegged with pencil-diameter “treenails”. The frame is sanded and Tung oiled, covered with ballistic nylon, and waterproofed with polyurethane paint, and launched. An eskimo, using driftwood and walrus hides, might take two or three years to gather the materials and make a boat; in the US, with perfect wood and modern materials available on line, we can put a boat together in a week or two. 

"Happy with the way his boat is taking shape, Semple looks forward to building a baidarka with Lovering and making a movie about the construction process. 'There’s just something special about using a tool you built yourself', he says, sitting in the kayak frame on the workshop floor."   

Kayak Design Revision

Ricardo has tweaked the design of his kayak, adding some deadrise, changing the coaming and moving the cockpit aft slightly.  I think it looks much better.  Click on the pic for a larger image. Comments?

Rebuilding the Frame

Here are some pics of the frame after I took the skin off my kayak. I took a block plane and shaved off any residual polyurethane where the skin adhered to the gunwales and chine stringers.  

Pulling the skin off took some big chunks off the keelson, so I ended up completely replacing the keelson. First I cut all the lashings which held the keelson to the ribs. Then I cut the keelson off the stems by sawing the pegs in the joint between the keelson to the stems. I happened to have a piece of cedar ready that was the perfect dimensions for a new keelson. It was left over from the build two years ago and I had been using it as a batten for lofting my sailboat. I attached the new keelson by extending the notch in the bow and stern stems and pegging it in place. But it wasn't as simple as all that: the old keelson was unfair and had quite a few unsightly humps and valleys, so I spent a lot of time fairing the new keelson with fairing blocks (between 1/8th and 1/4 inch deep) placed between the new keelson and ribs. The old keelson also was crooked near the stern, which explained the tendency for the boat to pull to the left.

On the deck I moved the forward deck stringers closer together medially. This way my knees would hit the underside of the deck skin lateral to the deck stringers. Previously my knees would hit the stringers themselves which was a little uncomfortable. During rolling my knees sometimes would slide off the stringers, but now the stringers would help keep my knees from sliding.

In the cockpit I lashed in a couple floorboards. The idea here is to keep my butt from making a big lump in the skin which slows the boat down. I'll be sitting on a doubled-over foam pad. If the floorboard turns out to be too uncomfortable I can always cut it out.

Another modification I did was to bring the forward ends of the chine stringers up about an inch to give the bow a finer entry. It will be interesting to see if this affects the performance in any perceptible way.

Lastly I brushed the frame with a couple generous coats of tung oil. I was happy with the choice of tung oil because it's thin and penetrates like water but hardens to a dry finish -- much better than the linseed oil I've used on previous kayaks, which is known to promote mildew growth anyway.

Please Comment On This Kayak

Ricardo sends this drawing of a kayak he has been working on in CAD.  He intends to build it in traditional skin-on-frame. The inspiration for the design came from a number of the drawings in Harvery Golden's book, Kayaks of Greenland.  How will this thing perform? Tell us what you think.  Be honest and don't be afraid of hurting his feelings! (Click on the pic for a larger version.)

 

Shedding My Skin

I know I said I wasn't going to be doing any boatbuilding until the end of 2009, but the reason for that was partly to to give myself time for maintenance of the boats I already have.  So now I'm starting my long list of kayak projects.  First of all, I'm reskinning my historic reproduction of the Howard Chapelle's 1948 Greenland kayak, The Jewel.

Here is what my kayak looked like after two years of regular use and storage outside: generally in good condition except some wear around the coaming, especially the back deck, and where my knees and feet pressed against the underside of the foredeck. Also, the thin coat of one−part polyurethane that I put on is flaking off from the underlying two−part polyurethane. Brushing on that coat of one−part hardware store polyurethane was a big mistake. I did it purely for cosmetic reasons, to cover the glossy sheen of the two-part polyurethane. It lasted a year before it started to peel off.

If it wasn’t for all the unsightly peeling I probably wouldn’t have bothered replacing the skin for another few years, but it had gotten just too embarrassing to show off anymore. So I finally took a box cutter to the skin and pulled the whole thing off. This also gave me the opportunity to remove the rub strips I glued and pegged to the keelson and chines. Although they were traditional, the skin was plenty abrasion resistant by itself so they really weren’t necessary anyway. I suspect they also added some drag and slowed the kayak down. I also wanted to tweak the frame a little, giving the bow a finer entry and see if I could finally figure out why the kayak tended to pull to the left. 

The skin adhered well to the frame. I was able to pull it off, but had to cut the skin into several pieces to make it easier. In some areas, it stuck so well to the frame that it tore chunks out of the gunwale and keelson. Whether that happened depended on if I was pulling the skin with or against the grain. If you ever do this yourself, I recommend that if you start tearing wood just pull in the other direction. 

The frame looked like it held up well. The lashings were still tight, except for a couple lashings in the floorboards.  No signs of rot, but the frame felt wet and heavy. It was probably seasoned like driftwood. I found pockets of sand at the ends. I suspect that it never completely dried out since the first time I took her out. The moisture would explain the significant weight gain over the years: the day she was completed she weighed 29 pounds, but last year in the middle of winter she weighed 44 pounds. Originally, I didn't oil the frame because I thought it an unnecessary step to preserve the wood which would be constantly exposed to saltwater. But this time I’m going to coat it generously with tung oil to see if it will inhibit the absorption of water and keep the weight down.

Next step: repairing the frame

Make up your own caption

[Lodro Dawa and the 1/3 skin-on-frame.]

Super Secret Kayak Project X Revealed at SSTIKS 2008!

Remember Super Secret Kayak Project X that I reported about back in February? That was the skin-on-frame kayak commissioned by Dick Mahler, designed and constructed by Portland, Oregon kayak builder Lodro Dawa of Monkcraft Kayaks. Well I missed the South Sound Traditional Inuit Sea Kayak Symposium (SSTIKS) this year so I didn't get to see it unveiled.  

The kayak is a three piece Greenland-style skin-on-frame. It has watertight hatches and bulkheads which attach together with bolts. Dick told me that Chris Cunningham, editor of Sea Kayaker Magazine wanted to do an article for Sea Kayaker on it. Chris requested that Dick make sure that no pictures of it get out on the Internet before his magazine article came out.  Well, too bad, because the cat's already out of the bag!  These are some of the pics that Stephen S published recently on his awesome SSTIKS gallery.

Great job, Lodro!  I heard she's a pretty sweet ride too.  Click on the pics for a closer look.

Sunday Morning TV

Corey Freedman of The Skinboat School in Anacortes, Washington has recently updated his website.  Once you start browsing through it you'll realize that Corey has been building skin boats a very long time.  It's fortunate for us that he's finally published his collection of photographs (some dating back two decades) and videos on the internet.  There is even a Chevy Truck commerical and what looks like an ad for a Delonghi spaceheater.  (I suspect that maybe Corey built those boats.)

A real gem in the collection is footage of the skin boat gathering at Bowman Bay hosted by the Skin Boat School in 1998 with special guests Maligiaq and John Heath.  This is truly historic footage!  It looks a lot like the South Sound Traditional Inuit Kayak Symposium (SSTIKS) does these days.  I suppose there's no reason it wouldn't.  After all, as the years go by doesn't traditional kayaking just only tend to get more... traditional?   

One more thing:  Warren sends a cool little video he took of himself messing around in Deception Pass with a little GoPro camera mounted on the bow.  It was a fantastic day to be out!

Announcing: Qajaqs for everyone!

OK, I’ll admit that once in a while I fight a strong urge to go shopping for a fiberglass production boat.  After all, who would not be attracted to the idea of having spacious dry compartments, a comfortable molded seat and drop down skeg?  I’ve even gone so far as to call dealers and demo a few.  But something always stops me -- my inability to decide on a color scheme, lack of storage space in my garage, the thought that I would only really use it for a week or two touring in the summer (not to mention the price)!  Ultimately though it’s probably the thought that, given a little work and a year or two, I could make that elusive "perfect kayak" myself out of wood!  (Well, maybe once I finish that last project that's been sitting neglected in the shop.)

There have been exciting developments recently in the qajaq building world, just in time for the New Year.  If you were thinking of finally building that kayak in 2008, you have a couple more options to look into. 

First of all, Lodro Dawa of Monkcraft kayaks now has a custom Greenland kayak kit for sale.  Without having to equip your own woodshop, you too can make a skin-on-frame kayak.  According to the Monk:

"The kit comes with everything you need, including a fully illustrated and very detailed assembly manual and technical support if you get stuck. To complete the kayak little woodworking is required. The gunwales are milled to shape, mortised, marked and pre-drilled for the deck beams and ready to go. The deck beams are cut and ready to install, as are the pre-bent ribs. The stems, coaming and all others parts are ready for assembly. Once you have completed the frame, you’ll skin it, dye and shrink the skin, apply the polyurethane and fit out the kayak. This kit is designed so that you can built it in your living room if necessary and will take only 30 to 40 hours to complete. Only simple ordinary tools are required."

Price is $985.  Just like the custom-built kayaks, each kit is customized according to the paddler's  dimensions and skill level.

Secondly, if you are still insist on building your own kayak from scratch, Wolfgang Brinck has published instructions for building a Greenland Kayak on the Instructables website.  By the way, if you like building, Instructables is a cool site to surf on.  You can find instructions on how to make a little matchstick rocket or bathroom slippers with LED lights on the tips, for instance.   Brinck’s method of building is a modification of the HC Petersen and Svend Ulstrup methods.  The instructions are long and quite detailed, so I haven’t had a chance to read through it completely.  Looks like a nice boat though.