Congratulations! I admire your "Go for it" spirit. Congrats for finishing!!! Your kayak looks very nice. I hope you and your daughter enjoy it. Time to build another one so you can paddle together!! Thanks for sharing. It's inspiring.

Happy Paddling,
Dee Ann

My daughter and I decided to build a kayak for fun. I bought Nick's book and
: it managed to convince me that someone with no experience and limited
: woodworking skills could build a really good boat. Actually Nick's book
: was great and told us almost everything we needed to know, but when things
: got a little difficult we could usually find the information we needed by
: searching on this bulletin board - so thanks for all the help you guys
: gave me!

: I thought it might be useful to share a few thought from an absolute beginner
: to encourage anyone else thinking of trying it.

: Sedna took a year to build, she's adapted from the Great Auk design to be
: 15ft long because my garage is only 16ft 6inches! One problem was placing
: the cockpit because we wanted to keep it the same size as the standard
: great auk cockpit, which meant we had to guess where the new centre of
: gravity would be. Looking at the photos of the boat on the water I think
: we may have got it slightly too far back, but the boat behaves really well
: so I'm not too concerned.

: We were having difficulty getting any of the woods listed in Nick's book at a
: reasonable price (we live in England, UK), but eventually bought some
: imported Douglas Fir from a timber merchant. It's a bit heavier than cedar
: but generally worked very well. We used a bit of Meranti on the deck to
: make a pattern, but the colour isn't much different from Douglas fir, and
: it's quite a heavy wood.

: We cut the strips with a very cheap hand held circular saw, which made it
: difficult to cut a constant quarter inch width - I think most of the
: strips were nearer to 8mm, but we had a lot of sanding to get everything
: smooth. That's one job I would do a different way if we build another one.
: We didn't use cove and bead but tried to plane the strips to the correct
: angle, we were a bit too enthusiastic and ended up with small gaps between
: the strips on the inside, which we filled later. We made a detachable end
: piece at each end of the skeleton which became part of the boat, this
: helped enormously when fitting the strips because there was something
: solid to fix them to. Staples didn't seem to work too well for us,
: probably because douglas fir at 8mm wide was just too stiff, so we used
: 30mm panel pins - the holes are a little bigger than staple holes but
: there are less of them, and as beginners appearance wasn't necessarily top
: of our priority list.

: We didn't have the confidence to build the cockpit coaming from strips so we
: built it up from plywood.

: We bought the epoxy and fibreglass from Fyne Boats, unfortunately they didn't
: specify the weight of the fibreglass, but basically we used one layer
: inside and out, and two on the hull. The end result was a very solid boat,
: if a little heavy. According to my scales she came in at 28kg, which means
: I can carry her very short distances only.

: Now comes the only real difficulty we had: after fibreglassing we were in a
: hurry and tried to varnish a couple of days after the last coat of epoxy.
: We used Rustins tung oil based yacht varnish, and it simply refused to
: dry. I think the problem was probably amine blush, but the only solution
: was to scrape the varnish off, wash everything down and start again. I
: wasn't entirely sure what the cause of the problem was so we changed the
: varnish to International yacht varnish, which we bought from B & Q.
: That seemed to work absolutely fine.

: If you look closely at the woodwork you can see a few areas of filler, and
: there are plenty of changes I would make another time, but we've had so
: much fun building and paddling her, I don't regret a minute of it.