: Where can I find blue prints on building kayaks?

Start with a book or two. Your library should be able to get you one or more through interlibrary loan (ask specificially about this) if they do not have any of these books in their collection. Dealing with your library is free, but give them a hand by having some information for them.

There are several books which have plans for building kayaks and the instructions you would need. If you check at Amazon.com for boat building and kayak building boooks you will find works by Dyson, Morris, Cunningham, Starr, Schrade, Hazen, Putz, and Kulczycki. Search for the author's name and "boat" to find the appropriate books. From the Amazon.com pages you can get a review of the book to decide if it is appropriate to what you want. You want to copy down from this website the complete title of the book, the full list of authors, the publisher, and the ISBN number. Amazon has all this information.
If you take this info to your library it will make the librarians very happy, as it saves them a lot of hassle. They will find a library which has the book or books which you want, and in a few days you should have it.

If you decide to build a boat based on the plans from any of the books you read you should probably buy a copy so you will have it on hand during construction. By reviewing several books first, through the library, you can decide which books you don't want to buy--it will save you some money.

If you have some carpentry experience and just want to jump right in, look at the kayak plans at www.clarkcraft.com. They have good writeups on about 15 different models. Their plans come with a short, but complete, list of instructions. Many of the designs they sell were designed 30 to 40 years ago, and have been successfully built for decades. If you have questions about them then write back. Someone here has probably built one.

For newer designs you can check a list of designers which is located on this board. here is a direct link to the page:

http://www.seekayak.com/Businesses/Plans_and_Kits/

If you are interested in designing a boat from scratch--which I do not recommend for a beginner-- there are also a couple of free, or inexpensive shareware programs available that will help.

As you dive into the books you will see that ther are three basic groups of home-built kayaks which are made of wood, another basic group is kayaks make from plastics (including carbon fiber, kevlar, and fiberglass) and the last group would be "others", which would be for kayaks made from, well, you name it.

I suspect you will select a plan for a kayak which is built with wood. The three types of wood-kayak construction are: strip built, stitch and glue, and skin on frame. The skin-on-frame style is a modern adaptation of the original aleut, eskimo, or greenland style boats used for centuries in the Artic regions. Despite their fragile appearance, these designs are very durable and reliable. The stitch and glue method is used for rapid construction with plywood. Parts for the boat are precisely cut and held together (stitched) by short lengths of wire which are inserted into small holes drilled near the edges of the panels. When the wires are twisted they tighten up and draw the panels together, holding them in place while you apply a layer of epoxy and strips of fiberglass cloth to the inside seam. This glues the panels together permanently. You can remove the wires and then cover the outside of the boat with a layer of fiberglass, or jsut cover the seams with some epoxy and strips of glass fabric. Either way the holes the wires were in are filled and you have a leakless seam.

When building a kayak with wood strips you first make a series of paterns for the shape of the boat at different places along the length of the boat. These patterns are made from plywood or particle board, and are mounted to a sturdy support--a table or a "strongback". Thin strips of wood are applied to these forms. The strips bend to follow the line of the forms and are ehld in place with staples or clamps. After one strip is place on the forms anotherone is added, and glued to the edge of the first strip. A third strip is glues to the open edge of the second one, and so on, adding strips which are glued to the preceding work. Eventually you cover the forms with the wood strips and have something that looks like a boat. Then you remove any staples and sand things smooth. This wood structure is then covered with a layer of glass cloth and several coats of epoxy resin. Once that has hardened you remove the building forms, sand the interior, and apply a layer of fiberglass and resin there. This gives you a composite structure which is a wood core sandwiched between two layers of fiberglass. It is very strong and lightweight.

Good luck with your preliminary searching. When you have found a plan, or plans, which seem to suit your needs write back and ask for some opinions. People here can tell you if the boat performs well, is easy to build, etc.

If you can't decide on a plan, you can get lots of free advice here, too. (and worth exactly what you pay for it!) What we would need to know, though, would be information about your size: height, weight, and shoe size--don't laugh at that last one. There are a lot of boats with low decks which are fine for people with small feet, but they need to be modified to fit larger people. It is not a big deal to do, but you have to know it at the start. We would also want to know th area of the world where you are located and the type of water you would be on: flat lakes, slow rivers, fast rapids, large lakes or oceans.

Good luck with your research.

Hope this helps

PGJ