Hi J.D.

A little background. I am building a folding kayak per Blandford plans, and most of the frame is done, except for coaming, deck beams, and diagonal braces. I am sanding and varnishing the rest of the frame before final alignment. I never imagined sanding and varnishing would take so long. Maybe by the end of the year.

I am not familiar with old Folboat's but if your boat is rigid, and not folding it should be much simpler. Please have a look at the following kayak site for ideas and check out his building pages. Note that he uses canvas, which is stretched, stapled to the frame, and then painted.

http://www.qsl.net/wa1urb/

I would also recommend the book "Canoes and Canoeing" by Percy W. Blandford. This was published in the 1960's but is usually available through interlibrary loan. It is a construction manual and has details on how to build a number of rigid and one folding kayak. His skin technique is to use one big piece of fabric with v-cuts at the ends, which are sewn up at the stems, with no seams below the waterline. He mentions that most people were skinning lately with pvc rather than canvas. Folbot used to have an excellent picture of this detail on their virtual plant tour, but unfortunately have redone their web site and the picture is gone. PVC has very little stretch, and sometimes it is hard to get a snug fit without using sponsons. Anyways, Folbots web site is at

http://www.folbot.com/tour1.htm

A skin kayak is supposed to flex. By covering with fiberglass you lose that advantage. If you can find a copy of George Dyson's book Baidarka, he used to cover his early kayaks in fiberglass. Later he used nylon, covered with hypalon paint. His chapters on skinning a boat are probably the definitive resource on the subject. He stitches the skin up tight around the boat like a big sock. Since Nylon shrinks when heat is applied, this is how wrinkles are removed. George sells skinning material also, nylon, polyester, needles, etc. Some people paint with Gacoflex (Hypalon paint), Snowcote (A roofing paint), polyurethane, Latex, Thompson's Watersealer, you name it they tried it. Skin as I mentioned could be canvas, nylon, polyester, pvc etc.

Other books to try for skinning would be The Aleutian Kayak by Wolfgang Brinck.

If you have skinning questions best bet is to ask on the baidarka mailing list. The archives can be searched at

http://robroy.totalsports.net/baidarka/

Since my boat is folding I will be using PVC. You can try gluing up PVC samples from a local awning shop. I tried HH-66 vinyl cement and it worked pretty well. The other method for skinning with pvc would be to cut in strips and glue along the chines. This method was used by Hendrik Maroske on his kayaks, found at

http://robroy.totalsports.net/baidarka/slideshow/index.html

His brother, Gerald, who built a Greenland folder, advised sewing as well as gluing.

This should hopefully give you some ideas. Good luck and keep us posted.

Paul.