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Building Ken Taylor 1959 Kayak – the Igdlorssuit – Part Five
Control Box – 1 Hours The control box for the skeg is built much the same way as the deck fittings. A four and a half inch slot is cut into the hull. It’s located near the center of the coaming. A foam mold is inserted into the slot and covered with paste wax and mold release. Then thickened epoxy is used to round the corners and 5 layers of 3.2 ounce tight weave glass is used to lay-up the control box. After the box is finished, drill a hole to insert the tubing. I covered the hull around the skeg control box with packing tape, so I would be…
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Building Ken Taylor 1959 Kayak-the Igdlorssuit – Launching
Wetting the kayak in the crystal clear water of Lake Superior was the best reward for almost a year of building. Ilena and I launched the Iggy with little fanfare. John Amren, owner of Superior Coastal Sports in Grand Marais was the only other attendee, and he was there because we choose the beach behind his shop as our point of departure for a tour around the Grand Marais harbor. The Iggy is a semi-replica of the 1959 Ken Taylor kayak that spawned the Anas Acuta and spurred modern British recreational kayaking. The original Iggy was built as a skin-on-frame in Igdlorssuit (Illorsuit is the new spelling) by Emanuele Korneiliussen.…
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Building Ken Taylor 1959 Kayak – the Igdlorssuit – Launching – Susie Islands
The second trip with the Iggy involved a trip from Grand Portage, out to the Susie Island and then to the border.
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How to Make a Fiberglass Skeg
A skeg is an effective tool that can help control a kayak in difficult conditions. In quartering wind and waves, it can be a godsend. For the average backyard builder, commercial skegs tend to be expensive and most backyard builders will have the skills to fabricate their own. When looking at skeg options, I’ve never been able to find a wooden one that satisfied my sense of durability and simplicity. So, I set out to make a fiberglass skeg that would work well in a wooden kayak. Below you’ll find the steps that I took. Subscribe to Blog via Email Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and…
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Building a Kayak Paddle – A La Volkskayak
Many thanks to VOLKSKAYAK designer Gerry Gladwin for allowing me to share his idea and the diagram with others who want to do it for themselves. I hope the instructions below will be helpful in making a simple, light, cheap sea kayak paddle that’s very serviceable. We’ve been using three of these for several seasons now, and apart from some cosmetic damage, have had no problems with them. The cost is under $25 per paddle. I can get one done to the “finished with the epoxy work” stage with about a day’s work. Our paddles weigh a little under a kilogram; mine’s 950gms., while the one my wife made for…
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How To Make Woven Rope Carrying Handles
Pedro Almeida describes how to make Rope handles for your kayak. These work well as carry handles for singles and especially doubles for those who don't want or need a typical end toggle on their kayak.
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Building a Nikumi
Safety Note: A vinyl skin is not safe for normal use. This is for show only. Hundreds of years ago, the Aleuts paddled slender kayaks up and down the west coast of North America in search of sealskins and adventure. Their kayaks, called baidarkas by the Russians, were typically narrow, fast, and featured crazy looking bifid or split bows. I first gained an interest in this type of kayak after reading George Dyson’s visionary book Baidarka, and the more I read, the more interesting these kayaks became to me. Eventually, I purchased Wolfgang Brinck’s The Aleutian Kayak with the intension of building a traditional baidarka using traditional methods. But, after…
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Building a Perfect Kayak: My Adventure in Kayak Design and Cedar Strip Building
I stood looking up at the kayak, a plastic Dagger Magellan, inside of our newest yet unopened store in the middle of Iowa. With the sunlight beaming through the sunroof and hitting the plastic of the kayak, which was standing on its end, I could see a small clear flaw. When the rep showed up, I pointed it out and he called to see if he could get a discount. When I mentioned that I was interested in purchasing it, he got an even better price for me – a price well below pro-deal. After he handed the phone over to me, a visa card number later and the boat…
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Building a Perfect Kayak: Part Two
Subscribe to Blog via Email Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address Subscribe In the last installment of Building a Perfect Kayak, I laid out the design criteria for my new kayak and ran into some software problems. Mainly, with the software that I’m using, I couldn’t export rounded stations to build the forms for the kayak. Because Hulls, the boat design program I used, is made to produce plywood panels, it lacked the features needed to accomplish these rounded stations, so I downloaded and tried a program called Sketch-Up. Kayak Forms First, for those readers that haven’t…
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Building a Perfect Kayak: Part Three
If you remember from the previous article, I had just figured out a way to output forms from Hulls by using an extra chine above the design of the kayak. This extra chine gave me a common point in all the forms, and with the click of two buttons provided me with perfectly aligned offsets to plot on paper (albeit paper which looks like a brown paper bag, because I’m unable to buy white roll or tracing paper in Grand Marais, MN. I can’t wait to see my wood choices or maybe wood choice. Pine looks okay, right?) After I figured this out, I charted the Righting/Heeling Moments for the…
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Building a Perfect Kayak: Part Four
Subscribe to Blog via Email Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address Subscribe With the design steps over, I moved on to figuring out what wood to build this craft with, but, first, I fired off an email to Gregg Carlson suggesting a few improvements for his excellent program, Hulls. I suggested that he should have the program calculate the Block and Mid-ship Coefficients, which would help simplify the process for inputting the data into KAPER. He promptly wrote me back, and mentioned that he was thinking about setting up a project on Source Forge, and that he…
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Building a Perfect Kayak: Part Five
Background Way back in episode two, I explained about station forms and what they are used for, and I mentioned the strong back. If you don’t remember all that dribble then you may want to head back there for review, because in this episode they are the main character. Attempt One So, after I had finished milling the strips I went to the local lumber store and picked up a couple sheets of 1/2″ CDX plywood (BTW, including labor after this episode my kayak costs $593.76, so far.) The forms of the kayak are laid out on this CDX plywood and then cut out and aligned on the strong back.…
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Building a Perfect Kayak: Part Six
Those Little Setbacks in Boat Building My old strong back was beautiful. Built from some of the best 16′ 2x8s I’ve ever seen, and topped with a lovely almost clear 16′ 1×6, the strong back was straight true, and had proven it on several canoes. But as all great things come to an end, my strong back ended its life on a burn pile in the woods somewhere. I gave it away before moving to Minnesota, and they left it in the rain and the snow, and by spring, it was done. Firewood it became. My current strong back, unlike my old one, is a hunk of junk. Somehow, somewhere,…
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Building a Perfect Kayak: Part Seven
Subscribe to Blog via Email Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address Subscribe Having finished the bottom of the kayak, I flipped it over and for the first time got to see – I mean really see – my kayak. It was a stunning moment. Not only did the stems look true to each other and not twisted (I guess all the work I did beating the heck out of my strong back worked,) but also the shape and rise of the sheer line was fair and beautiful. I quickly cleaned up the shop and got the tape…
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Building a Perfect Kayak: Part Eight
A perfect kayak not only is one that performs perfectly in all the aspects that you desire, but one that you are building and have designed can only be perfect if everything goes correctly, the shape ends up as you wanted it, and then when finished it performs better than anything else that you’ve paddle. Such a perfect kayak would fail as a learning experience. I’ve often found that I and other people that have worked for me learn more from the mistakes they have made on their own, than having their hand held along the way and achieving perfection. I figured this out with my first and only $60,000…