: It's not a full SOF. It's a Guillemot S&G and I'm putting an SOF deck on her.
: Rather unconventional so far. Plywood half frames, 5/8ths inch dowel rods for
: stringers, it's all out of my head at this point. Tons of great ideas from
: this forum tho!

If you are just doing the deck then the aircraft dacron should be just fine.

Unless you make a habit out of landing your boat upside-down -- which will be a lot harder on the paddler than the deck -- the lightweight fabric is not going to be subjected to anywhere near the stresses or abuse that fabric on the bottom of a hull would receive. Since most people wrap their S-O-F kayaks with a single fabric, they buy the heavier hull-weight cloth, and keep using it for their decks, too. It is fast to build this way and requires far less sewing.

Why use dowels for your stringers? They tend to be stiff, hard to fasten and expensive. It should be far cheaper to just rip some square or rectangular cross-section strips from a 1x6, 1x4, or whatever. anywhere from 3/8 by 3/4 to 3/4 by 3/4 should do the job of supporting deck fabric -- depending of course on how they are supported and how long they are.

What kind of use are you expecting for this boat? Mostly flat water?,rapids? surfing waves? rolling? If you don't expect to get the deck submerged a lot, don't paint it or finish it until you've had a chance to use the boat for a while. Even unpainted the fabric should have some ability to shed most of the water from the occasional wave -- and the open fabric will allow some air movement in the boat, keeping things a bit cooler. Of course if you expect a lot of water to land on the deck then by all means coat it. But again, since this is not going to be subjected to the hull's abuses, it won't need a heavy coating. A colored polyurethane might be pretty. Or, the airplane dope.

Backtracking -- umm, backpaddling

PGJ