2005-04-17 20:45

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I started off my day with some additional house repair, but once I finished that up around noon I was able to turn my attention back to my kayak project. I haven’t been able to do much with it in the last couple weeks because of various big house related projects (no end in sight there either ;-)) and Eawyn’s weekday evening sleep schedule, so I had to take advantage of a couple spare hours when I got them. I’ve had my strongback materials for a few weeks now so I decided to get to work on putting it all together.

The strongback is basically a long wooden beam used to hold the kayak cross sections and frame during construction. There are a variety of different approaches to strongback construction depending on what type of kayak you’re building, but in my case I’m sticking with Tom Yost’s design since I’m building one of his kayaks. I was immediately forced to make a slight deviation from his design when I discovered one of my newly purchased two by fours was now badly warped. I decided to substitute two of the left over 18 inch sections in the place of the two 30 inch pieces in original design. It ended up working pretty well and shouldn’t impact the overall strength of the strongback significantly. I still need finish the second 18 inch section and cut and attach the top boards, but it’s pretty cool to see it taking shape.