Current methods of building kayaks, and other boats, from wood are based on the idea of building a single boat from an original set of plans. This works fine for the home craftsman building their own boat, and it is equally fi ne forr the profesional boat builder who might get hired to build a special boat.

But if you want to make a living by building just wood kayaks or canoes you will need to invent new tehniques for mass production, or at least research and modernize the production techniques of canoe factories from the late 1800s through the early 1900s. Fortunately there are good books about some of these companies.

As I see it, the reason that the kayak industry has mostly adopted various plastics, rather than continue using wood, is that they can produce boats faster.

To stay in business you need to sell the boats. If you can sell 1000 boats a year to a major sporting goods store, then you need to be able to make all those boats with consistent quality, and ship them to the stores. That means producing 3 to 4 boats a day. Because of the time it takes for glue and epoxy to harden, and for paint and varnish to dry, a shop would need o have at least 28 to 36 boats in production all the time. Every day you would finish 4 boats, and start 4 more which would be finished 7 to 9 days later.

Each boat would require a mold or strongback and frame on which it was built. These take up space.
That calls for a big shop, and if you want to produce boats at that rate you need to have 14 to 18 people--assuming each person can work on two boats at a time.

With the cheapest method of fiberglass production a crew of two people can spray chopped fiberglass and a fast hardening resin into 3 or4 molds and produce 8 to 12 hulls a day. While the fiberglass resin for one batch is hardening in the molds, the same two people can be attaching fittings to the boats that just came out of the molds.

PGJ