Why Build Your Own Kayak?

A friend of mine recently posted a picture of a customized car from circa 1970 Houston, Texas.  What struck me about the photo was that the owner of the car clearly wasn't satisfied with the amount of chrome that designers back in Detroit were putting on cars at the time, so he took matters into his own hands and added chrome to a level that he felt was appropriate.

And this same sort of urge, not the urge for more chrome, but the urge for more cool is what led me to start building my own kayaks. It was not about money, it was simply the desire for a superior esthetic over what commercial manufacturers were capable of delivering. Others may disagree.  Many prefer the look of shiny plastic.  I prefer the cool of skin on frame.

Old Kayak, Bent Ribs & Buckliballs

 

In my previous post, I described how one of my kayaks spontaneously changed shape in response to a shrinking skin.  While this type of response would generally have been regarded as mechanical failure, researchers are now trying to steer this kind of phenomenon to make it perform useful tasks, that is by creating a variable shape that can adapt to conditions.

Buckliball changing from large to small (left to right) in response to external stress

Paraphrasing here - One stress makes you larger, one stress makes you small, and the stress that mother gives you don't do anything at all. Never mind.  Pause for groans to subside.

geodesic dome assembly

By the way, if you didn't grow up in the sixties, which is likely, you probably missed Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes and also buckyballs which he invented and which I suppose buckliballs is a pun on.

Old Kayak, Bent Ribs

I've got one more set of photos on deck for the old kayak series.  Not that I don't have more old kayaks or old kayak photos, but it's a matter of being able to find them.

Today's tale of woe is all about the lethal combination of heavy nylon fabric and a boat left out in the sun for too long.  Nylon, if you don't already know, contracts with high temps and as you can see in the photos, pushes down on the keelson and bends the ribs into a reverse curve.  This isn't that bad, mostly it makes the hull a little flatter.  What is worse is the end to end shrinkage of the fabric which compresses the keelson which responds by taking on something of an S curve when viewed from above.  This makes the boat pull to one side.  But even that is not lethal and I managed to fix it with a rudder.  It's just that the boat is not the elegant craft that you started out with. So beware of heavy nylon combined with heavy sun.