Ribs and the waiting game

The interesting thing about this kayak is that there are no drawings for plans by which I mean highly technical ones with a fine pencil, more lines than kayak and incredibly small numbers. It's all based off of your body for measurements like the arm span is three arm spans, so start off your gun'l's at that length minus a foot and a half or the paddle is your armspan plus the distance from your elbow to your fingertips (a cubit). So instead of referring to drawing all the way along, you create this as you go along, shaping it with your eyes and brain as you massage it into existence.

This being said, a byproduct is that you can't work ahead of yourself. You can't measure out the ribs before you have a deck to measure them for. You can't do that until you've taken the time to create a deck that is at once has visually appealing curves as well as trying to make it a sleek, swift, wave-riding machine that can also cut through the dawn's still water in the silence. So you might be able to imagine how this journey evolves in the mind and slowly takes over your thoughts. At work I think about the journeys I'll take as well as the next design steps in line. This also forces a slower build and makes you work at the kayak's pace.

Since the last blog post, I have measured the ribs of the finished deck, cut them and prepared them bending. This process involves soaking them for three to four days and I am currently 24 hours into that step. I have had time to make the bending jig, cut out the pieces for the steamboxes and clean up the badly neglected workshop in this time. It's a nice little calm before the fairly intensive session of steam-building to come! More time to devote to dreaming up the rest
of the kayak!


This is me after I measured out the ribs (beam across gun's plus a fist and a half for me) and made temporary ones of wire to figured out the kayak's depth. I am sitting in it checking out how it will feel here. I was pretty stoked on it right away, the foot rest sitting at a perfect height with room to rest and just touch the foot beam and the back rest at the same time. It feels great relaxed but tight enough to brace against the backrest, thighbeam/massik (to be created) and the footbeam in a moment noticed, quite a necessary thing in hairy water AKA the fun stuff.

I'm not really sure yet what perspective I'm writing this blog from. I don't want to be too involved in the technical side because if you want the details, buy the book, it's cheap and better than I could ever be on a blog for that. If you want to know more about it from me, we can talk about that outside the blogosphere, I'd be happy to talk, share and learn! I really appreciate the Greenland community feel, which has already helped me along so much in my progress here. So this blog is becoming more of a technical bulletin for people who want to see a layman's progress in a fun project with insights into the journey involved. I hope I've been able to hint at the joy involved in creation in this post. Here's a picture of a beautifully satisfying lash.