Thread: Own design "kayak" plan

I tried to put this comment in your other post about how to rip the boards into strips, but as that post is over 113 days old, I couldn't reply to it.


I imagine that you will have already ripped your strips by now. I missed your post when it first appeared.

However, my comment might be useful for the next time you build a stripper.

Strips for kayaks and canoes are almost always quarter sawn. That is the growth rings are parallel to the short, 6 mm face. Since they are normally ripped from a 19 mm board, that board starts off back sawn. That is the growth rings are parallel to the wide face.

Most people consider that it looks better that way and you have a lot less trouble planing and sanding the kayak if the strips are quarter sawn.

I am not suggesting that they have to be cut that way. One of my kayaks has several strips that are not quarter sawn. However the vast majority are, for the reasons I mentioned.

That is an extra factor to consider when working out which way to get your strips out of big planks.

Thanks bloke!

Yes I have already cut the strips - and they are relatively rough but will have to do.

They are cut from recycled WRC so there was not much choice about how to orient them within the planks. Many are very straight grained and bend/twist superbly but some have a lot of figure and I wonder if they will be as strong.

Do you have any comment about the differences shown in this photo?


For future builds the plan is to use the rest of the WRC in combination with new Paulownia but for now I have to make do with what I have. These strips are also almost 30mm wide so some will have to be split down to around 1/2" - but I will try to use them in the wider form as much as possible

Having the strips almost 30 mm wide will create two difficulties in some places.

The first problem will be that it will be harder to get them to conform to the curve of the forms. I'm sure you already know that as you have mentioned ripping some in half for the difficult bits.

The other problem is that they will be very hard to bend across the wide face. Fortunately your sheerline is fairly straight. If you had an upswept bow, it would probably be impossible to bend the strip up enough at the end. However you don't have that problem.

There will be places as you work your way down the hull towards the keel where you will find the curve required is just too much for the wide strips. The sooner you can start stripping the football on the bottom of the hull working out from the keel, the easier it will be because you will be using straight strips. When you get to the point shown in the photo of the bottom of the hull, you need to be adding straight strips. Your 30 mm or even 25 mm wide strips will not bend around that curve on the outside. Remember, a strip that is twice as wide is not twice as hard to bend. It is more like four times as hard, or something like that.

You might consider instead of ripping some of the strips down the middle to rip them so that you get something like 18mm and 7mm wide. I am assuming 28 mm to start with and 3mm lost as sawdust. Those 6 or 7 mm wide strips can be useful. On the deck of my last sea kayak in the middle photo, the outline curves were a piece of cake with strips about 8 mm wide. Trying to do the dark bit with a couple of normal 19 mm strips was right at the limit of what I could bend even with the heat gun.

Thin strips can also be used to outline areas of different colours, like on the TK1. I really like that effect. Maybe you don't.

It looks in your photo as if the top strips are quarter sawn and the bottom ones are back sawn. You may need to be a bit more careful planing and sanding the bottom ones. Maybe try to use the ones like the bottom two in places where they don't need to bend much, like filling in the football on the hull.

Do you have enough of a selection of each type of strip to consider something like a panel on the deck of back sawn strips with carefully matched grain, outlined with some thin, contrasting strips and surrounded by quarter sawn strips? If you think having a few different strips will look out of place, don't try to hide them, make a feature of them and draw attention to them.