Pages

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Starting to build a strip kayak

I am beginning to build a tandum strip built kayak and I thought about posting a blog of my progress for friends to follow.

I plan on building the Guillemot Double as presented in Nick Schade's book The Strip-Built Sea Kayak but I have scaled the plan down to 17 feet using the method he describes in the book.

I began by inputting the offsets into an Excel spreadsheet and developing a formula for scaling the Kayak down. This took about 2 hours or so. I made an array of x,y,z coordinates and and imported them into AutoCad. I then plotted full size templates, spray mounted them onto 1/2" mdf plywood to cut them out. Anyone that wants to know how to do this in Excel and AutoCad please let me know and I'll give you the details. It is really cool to be able to view the forms in 3-D, rotate it and view the hull from various directions. You must have access to AutoCad for this.

I started on Saturday cutting the  forms and so far I have cut out my forms for stations 2 thru 18. I will begin to cut my 1/4" strips and start building the strong-back this weekend. I do not especially like the bow and stern shapes so my plan is to modify the ends so the  next step is to cut the end forms that I like and to modify forms 0.1, 1.0, 19 and 19.5. I will do this by building a mock-up of each end.


Above I am rough cutting the forms from the1/2 inch mdf plywood


Here I am using the band saw to trim the forms before sanding


 The photo above shows me sanding the forms to dimension
                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
The completed forms before routing the openings for the strong back

Routing the Strong Back guide holes


         The forms with the holes for the strong back

                                            
                                                                                                                                     

No comments:

Post a Comment