The only decisions I made with regard to deck beam and rib placement were to move the isserfik back enough to accommodate the longer cockpit, and in the original the ribs and deck beams met in the same place. The original had through-tenons for the deck beam-to-gunwale joints, and I didn't feel like I would have enough strength if I were to put the rib and deck beam in the same place after shrinking the size of the gunwale.

If you are really worried about where to place things I would offer a couple of pieces of advice- one would be to order H.C. Petersen's Instructions in Kayak Building from the Qajaq USA store, and see if your local library has a copy of Building the Greenland Kayak by Mark Starr. It's out of print, but I think he does a better job of elucidating the design and showing where to put things than Cunningham, and he's a lot more pragmatic about tools than Cunningham. The design I replicated is in that book as well.

This is a photo of the measured drawing with my teeny tiny rule. I made a table from the drawing, then reduced the numbers 15%, then drafted it out full (shrunk 15%) size on drafting paper.

A friend of mine designed and built a strip kayak for his daughter, and it was 14' long. She's average sized (5' 3"-4"), like my daughter, and she still paddles it at 18. She prefers an 18 footer, but she still fits in the smaller kayak. I'm not sure how big "your" 14-year-old boy is... The can be pretty huge at that age. My nephews were all over 6' tall at 14.

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