Well - it all started with my wife Naz going kayaking with a friend of hers. she came home all excited and told me how much fun it was and what good exercise it was. well - it didn't take long till I was looking into kayaks. Man, those things are EXPENSIVE! A cheapo polyethylene one from Canadian Tire is nearly a grand!

Not being one to buy some piece of crap when you can make something better yourself, I started looking at kayak plans and reading web sites to find out everything about them. When I decided that this was something I could do the first place I turned was one of my favorite places - Lee Valley. The have a Bear Mountain kayak plan. I ordered it and in the meantime kept googling and web crawling.

While waiting for the L.V. plans to shop up, I happened onto a site - oneoceankayaks.com. It was a nicely organized site with TONS of kayak building information. I knew right away that this was a good resource and so I actually bookmarked it (I generally never bookmark ANYTHING).

I was impressed with all the designs and sizes and had a few email exchanges with the webmaster and kayak builder - Vaclav Stejskal. He answered emails promptly and thoroughly and got me going in the right direction. I felt that this was a better choice than the L.V. plans already (and I hadn't seen them yet). Here was a real flesh and blood person who I could turn to if I got stuck (and believe me, these plans look COMPLICATED)

So - I ordered the plans for the Storm SLT - the smallest kayak design in the oneoceankayaks fleet - 15.5 feet. Naz is light and slim so this design is perfect for her. The L.V. plans showed up and I gave them a cursory look and sent them back. Gotta love L.V. :)

Anyways - let's get on to building this sucker.

 

First a couple of pictures of my workshop - took me 2 weeks to clean it up and organize it in preparation for building the kayak. It was time well spent because it's now a pleasure to go out there. Still needs a bit of work but the bulk of it is done.

September 11, 2004 (no 9/11 jokes about this thing blowing up on me!)

Well - first thing that needs to be done is cut out all the paper patterns for the station molds. I've got scissors - I can do that! Then they get glued to a sheet of 5/8 particleboard. I used 3M Spray 77 - worked pretty darned fine - though I read the instructions from Vaclav AFTER I'd glued them on - apparently you're supposed to do 2 coats of glue, 10 minutes apart. Oh well - seems to have held
I rough cut the pieces with a jig-saw and got a pile of very hacked out shapes along with some very wild scrap pieces! Enough for one evening - Didn't even start this till after the kids went to bed so in for the evening!

September 12, 2004

Well - haven't lost interest yet - that's a good thing!

OK... the station molds had to be cut more accurately so I took them to the bandsaw and cut the shapes along the layout lines. Then - in a fit of unbridled tool-buying passion I headed for Home Depot to buy the Ridgid Oscillating spindle/belt sander that I've wanted for a long time and needed an excuse to buy. But - not 5 miles from home had a change of heart. Instead I came home and just made a mount for my belt sander instead. Here's what it looked like and it worked like a champ! Best of all, it cost me nothing
Here's the station molds after they've all been cut out, and sanded smooth. Cutting out all the molds and smoothing them to fair curves is a fair bit of work! And this is just a small single! There's a good 4 or 5 hours of work just to get to here and I still have to cut out the rectangles on each one so they can slide onto the spine!