A story of Gunwales

I am off to the races in building my skin on frame Greenland kayak.  In the past two weeks I have built 3 of my forms and cut my gunwales.

About two weeks ago my dad was over and helped me make my “story pole”.  I wish I had photos of that, seeing my dad who is in his 60’s and has one knee replaced crawling on a hardwood floor to mark the board was a sight.  Marking the balance board with your measurements is definitely a two person job.  It maybe takes 15min to lay out but you need another person to transfer the lines from your body to the board.  We also kept Chris Cunningham’s book close so we could check to make sure we had it right.  Once I had all the marks prescribed in the book on my board with pencil I cut the board down to make it more manageable.  My finished product is approximately 2” wide and 4’ long.  When I was all done cutting it down I went over the pencil makers with a permanent marker and wrote what each line was for, while marking the “no rib” zones in red.

Next I made 3 of the five forms.  In the book these aren’t made until later in the process but I had the ¾” plywood left over from making some cabinets so I went ahead and made them.  The end forms were a pain to make, you are dealing with a bunch 73 degree angles and I don’t like how Chris lays them out in his book.  In the book the dimension for the two sight holes are given from outside to outside.  I was once a draftsman and I’m accustomed to holes being center to center.  So I screwed up drawing the forms several times before getting them right.  Making and cutting the forms maybe took me 2 hours but most of time was in drawing the end forms that I had to do several times.

I had decided to use cedar for my gunwale, I like working with it as I’ve used it to make three Greenland paddles.  It is a nice soft wood that is rot resistant, but has lots of knots, which can bring its strength into question.  I purchased a 16’ cedar deck board from Menards for $17.  I went to Menard’s on a nice rainy day so no one else was out in the lumber yard while I picked through the stack of deck boards to find the straightest, knot free board I could find.  I did find one board that was almost knot free but it was about as crooked as a congressman so I settled on one with a few more knots but straight.

At home I planed the board down to 7/8” and ripped them to a width of 2 ½” and a length of 15’-8” (16” sorter than my overall length of 17’.  Once the gunwales were cut I laid out my ribs and deck beams.  This took me about an hour to lay out and is pretty straight forward if you follow Chris Cunningham’s directions.  The one thing I did do differently is use a framing square to mark the width of my mortises instead of a gauge as suggested in the book.  For me I could lay them out with the framing square in less time than it would take me to make the gauge.

My next step is to cut the blind mortises for the ribs, all 44 of them!  I will be doing that today so my next post should be when all mortises are done and maybe the deck beams in place.