Thread: Wood strip kayak - cheapest timber - pine?

Where are you located? What's available locally? Are you ripping your own strips, or do you need to buy them already sized?

If ripping your own, are there any good demo yards locally? If you're lucky, sometimes demolition timber can be really good stuff at a good price. It can be rubbish too.
If you can find a builder who is renovating an old house, you can sometimes score stuff like cedar and clear oregon for next to nothing (perks of the trade).

You might be able to reduce the cost of timber to zero. Part of the deck on a several of my kayaks cost me nothing. In fact all of the deck of my double sea kayak was free. It was made from strips cut from some old skirting boards.

I have also used free recycled WRC lining boards removed from a bathroom wall and from a kitchen island bench. Although the original dimensions of the lining boards makes it a bit wasteful for cutting full width strips. It makes better use of them if they are used for narrower accent strips.

My first strip built kayak was made from the offcuts produced by a timberyard when they cut huge planks down to commercial sizes. That was a lot cheaper than pine. They were just random sized strips that had been lying on the scrap heap in the yard for a year or more. They just needed to be dressed to size and ripped into strips.

If you find some WRC in a second hand building materials yard, it should be quite cheap and is better than buying pine. With a bit of searching, you might even get some free.

Pine would be pretty heavy. And it's not always the cheapest, the local mill up the road here can do Macro and Douglas fir for $4.90 per meter (dressed) where pine is almost $10.00 at the local building supplier.
I recon if you picked some nice light Macro boards you'd be in the same ballpark as red cedar weight wise but a lot cheeper money wise.

Originally Posted by Sumbloak

Where are you located? What's available locally? Are you ripping your own strips, or do you need to buy them already sized?

I'm in Brisbane - I'm not sure how to find out which timbers are available locally and good for this application? I'm not sure on ripping my own strips - all I have to work with are a jigsaw and circular saw so not sure I could make uniform smooth strips myself. If I can find cheap demolition timber I'd be willing to give it a go though. Then again, you mentioned that some of it can be rubbish and I'm not sure I'd be able to pick that.

Originally Posted by anewhouse

My first strip built kayak was made from the offcuts produced by a timberyard when they cut huge planks down to commercial sizes. That was a lot cheaper than pine. They were just random sized strips that had been lying on the scrap heap in the yard for a year or more. They just needed to be dressed to size and ripped into strips.

If you find some WRC in a second hand building materials yard, it should be quite cheap and is better than buying pine. With a bit of searching, you might even get some free.

How did you come by the offcuts at the timberyard - do you just tell them what you're doing and ask if they have any scraps lying around that would be suitable? Same with second hand building materials yard? How likely are they to steer me wrong or try to offload something useless on me if I admit I don't know timber?

Also, what equipment do you need to dress the timber yourself?

Originally Posted by Kiwi75

Pine would be pretty heavy. And it's not always the cheapest, the local mill up the road here can do Macro and Douglas fir for $4.90 per meter (dressed) where pine is almost $10.00 at the local building supplier.
I recon if you picked some nice light Macro boards you'd be in the same ballpark as red cedar weight wise but a lot cheeper money wise.

What are Macro boards? Tried a google search on this but came up with nothing helpful although plenty of macro photography of timber.

If you need to buy strips already sawn and dressed to size, there's not really any cheap option. To rip your own, you'd need a decent table saw at the least. If you can find someone who has a good table saw and a fine blade, you should be able to get usable strips straight off the saw (although you'll have more sanding later).

Picking good timber is pretty easy. You just need a straight grain with no knots (or not many, and not big ones).

By "macro" he means this stuff: Cupressus macrocarpa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It's not readily available over here, so I wouldn't worry about it.

Just a few dot points in no particular order:

- A heavy boat is less likely to get used so may not be worth having
- The 2 suitable timbers are WRC and Paulownia. Check out Allan's builds using both of these timbers
- If you can find some WRC secondhand and buy the rest as new paulownia it could be still affordable
- WRC is usually easy to identify in salvage yards mainly because of its weight but also colour
- Even new timber for the whole boat could cost less than the epoxy and glass
- I guesstimate that you could buy enough Paulownia for between $150 and $200 - how does that compare with your expectations for pine?
- With the amount of hours it takes to do a strip build you might as well make a good one - 200 to 300 hours is too long to "practice"
- If you make a good boat the first time the second will be great
- Don't buy cheap epoxy and glass - I tried cheap glass once and paid dearly both in dollars and in hours to strip the entire hull and redo it with good stuff.
- With the right jigs you can cut strips with a circular saw safely and with enough consistency. I didn't even have a power plane when I built mine.

Good luck with it whichever way you go.

One of the workers in the timber yard overheard me saying what I planned to do with the WRC and he suggested that I might be able to get what I needed from the pile of offcuts.

I used a thicknesser to dress the boards to a uniform 19mm. I have used a bandsaw to cut quite a few of my strips. I have also used various table saws of varying quality. With care they all do the job.

There are quite a few suggestions on the net about using power saws to cut strips. This is one example. Strip: Ripping strips with a plunge cut saw *PIC*

If the timber feels light and is fairly straight grained without knots, it should be suitable. Because the timber is encapsulated in glass and epoxy, it doesn't need any special waterproof qualities.

It might be worth your while investigating Paulownia from here:
Paulownia Timber Surfboard Suppliers, Build Surfboard, Marine, Boatbuilding

Last time I bought some, I got enough for four kayaks and it worked out around $100 per kayak. Although one was just a small child's kayak about 3.7 metres long. Freight can be expensive. I used to get my Paulownia from Whitewood on this forum, but he has retired and the supply has been passed on to Geoff Moase of Dovetail Surfboards in Burleigh Heads.

Thanks Sumbloak, Labr@ and Anewhouse. Sorry it's taken me a little while to get back to this post - have had some major distractions.

Originally Posted by labr@

Just a few dot points in no particular order:

- Even new timber for the whole boat could cost less than the epoxy and glass
- I guesstimate that you could buy enough Paulownia for between $150 and $200 - how does that compare with your expectations for pine?

- Don't buy cheap epoxy and glass - I tried cheap glass once and paid dearly both in dollars and in hours to strip the entire hull and redo it with good stuff.

- With the right jigs you can cut strips with a circular saw safely and with enough consistency. I didn't even have a power plane when I built mine.

Thanks, these are some very helpful thoughts. I hadn't started to think about the epoxy and glass and didn't realise there was good and bad stuff available. I'll have to start looking into that. I'm planning to work on and buy the materials in 3 stages: 1) frame, 2) strips, 3) fibreglass - that way I can work on one stage as I accumulate some money and look for materials for the next stage.

Good to know you can use a circular saw to cut strips as its probably what I'll end up doing - I'll practice on some scrap to get the jig set up, work out allowance for blade width etc.

Originally Posted by anewhouse

If the timber feels light and is fairly straight grained without knots, it should be suitable. Because the timber is encapsulated in glass and epoxy, it doesn't need any special waterproof qualities.

It might be worth your while investigating Paulownia from here:
Paulownia Timber Surfboard Suppliers, Build Surfboard, Marine, Boatbuilding

Last time I bought some, I got enough for four kayaks and it worked out around $100 per kayak. Although one was just a small child's kayak about 3.7 metres long. Freight can be expensive. I used to get my Paulownia from Whitewood on this forum, but he has retired and the supply has been passed on to Geoff Moase of Dovetail Surfboards in Burleigh Heads.

Thanks for this it looks like Paulownia is the way to go and cheaper than I expected. That looks like a good supplier for me - a bit out of my way but I could actually drive there to save on freight.

WRC is getting a bit hard to find around here (Ontario, Canada) without a long drive but I bought WRC fence planks for Rose Lee, my stripper (go on, look it up).

The downside is they're only 6' long but I am pretty good at scarfing so that's no big deal. The upside is they're consistent 5/8" thickness which is OK for stripping and they're slash cut so when I rip them I get strips with vertical grain. Another downside is, about 50% are only fence quality - but I got a lot of fences.

For ripping I use a handheld circular saw, most folk call 'em skilsaws here, and I get very good quality cuts. Trick one is decent blade: mine cost more than the saw actually, it's a thin kerf finish quality blade. Trick two is a plywood base plate, just drop the blade through it to make a zero clearance slot and it will provide splinter-free cuts. Trick three is a long and perfectly straight guide strip: I clamp it to the baseplate at first until I get it exactly right then screw it on and remove the clamps. It pays to check it's still tight once in a while too. It needs to be long enough to ensure the blade starts and ends the cut straight.

Of course you need to set the saw up nicely. If it's 30 years old and has built more than its fair share of sheds and fences then chances are its outboard bearing is graunched so check the play. After attaching the blade spin it to ensure it is on true. Get everything right and you can expect results comparable with a table saw.

The best part about a hand-held is, since you'll be moving the saw not the wood, the workpieces can be almost as long as the workshop - important for me as it's only a modified garage.

Mate,
a good timber suppliers near to you is Lazarides, somewhere in Eagle Farm, they come up on Google ! No idea as to how exxy they may be, I only but bowl blanks from them.
Will be interested to hear how you get on ,, I am starting a kayak build after Xmas ! I was lucky, a mate gave two huge slices of WRC !

Cam