Stripping the hull

The last two days have been chock full of [boat/wood]-wright learning. I bought a router from the habitat restore last year for 20$, and had never used it before yesterday, so it took some time to get it set up with the router bits I bought to mill my cedar strips. To strip-build a kayak or canoe you start above the water line and fit the strips together with a cove and bead (sort of like tongue and grove) working your way to the keel. The cove side points up and you fill them with glue for the next course, stapling everything to the forms. Here's the last picture I took before I started with the "sheer-strips" (the first course with just a cove milled upwards, the deck of the boat gets stripped right against the sheer line so it will all fit together).

It's sort of a shame to cover this up, it looks pretty cool in it's own right. You can also see that in order to do the hull first, it gets flipped upside down once the forms are all set up.

There are some big challenges with this which I'm feeling a lot better about now that I've made all the major mistakes the book talks about, and fixed them. The strip method of building is very forgiving of mistakes since there's very little you can screw up that fundamentally ruins the whole thing.

The first challenge is scarfing pieces together with a diagonal cut, which is trickier than it sounds. The other tricky bit is the bow and stern, which have some severe angles for the wood to bend along.


In addition to the staples, I needed to drive a couple of finish nails hold things together with some clamps. Below is the stern section, You can see in these pictures that I'm using a "finger joint" to weave together alternating pieces so they'll make a nice edge.


I'm finding that a handful of tools are all you really need (other than my router and saws and stuff). The block plane does a larger part of the work than I'd expected, and other than that I'm mostly reaching for my staple-gun, glue and clamps. I'm really impressed with the people online I've seen that don't use staples. As the book says, yes, they'll leave tiny spots in the finish, but only if you look really close, but who cares? Just staple it and get on with life. It will still look amazing. I'm down with that philosophy.


I'm pleased to have the first two courses done on either side tonight. Hopefully I'll get through a lot more of the hull tomorrow, the second course went a lot faster after I figured out a lot with the first course of sheer-strips.

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