Mid March SOF Kayak Build – Start Kayaking

This week about half the people were finishing up the deck beam tenons and lashing the beams to the gunwales. The bottom boat ribs are getting cut and one person got the steamer going Saturday to bent all his ribs. I think he only lost two to cracking and had to re-do them.

Wood this year I’m told is much better, more expensive as well, out leader has not told us this impact yet. I’m happy with how the wood looks, very few knots. The wood was cut to the correct widths and was put into the soaking trays to get them good and wet prior to steaming.

I followed the lead of Ben working next to me and planned down the ribs after cutting so they would fit into the mortise. Others are using the full width and narrowing down just the ends to fit in. We will compare these techniques later to see which one works best. This is all about lessons learned and passing on the experience to the next year. Bill gave me his photos from Friday to post as well.  Our leader is in the “haz mat” suit in the below photos and is the “steamer meister”.

A lot of the boats are at basically the same stage, those a little behind benefit form the experience of others to assist in the next step.

Kattie came late and missed the group shot Saturday.

Measuring the distance between mortises and the width outside to outside at mortise locating to caclulate the length of each rib (were engineers used a spreadsheet)

Electrical wire cut to rib lengths used to checkout how the fibs will look, allows changes prior to cutting wood.

Ribs cut but not planed yet.

The steamer was tried out and successfully used to bend the ribs for one boat on Saturday. Slow process doing a few at time. Two boxes will be fired up for the next session.

Just a photo from Monday showing the Huron River flowing into Strawberry Lake, Zukey Lake frozen, won’t be long to start kayaking again up and down the river. Can you name the lakes shown?