Summer is coming, and everyone in the neighborhood seems to have been bitten by the kayak bug. Not wanting to be left behind I decided I wanted to have one to.
Not having much money to spend, I decided to build one with the following guidelines:
- It had to be cheap
- It had to be easy to build (I'm rather lazy when it comes to such things)
- It needed to require a minimum of tools (I don't have many)
- It needed to not be a total piece of crap, as my OCD would drive me nuts otherwise and I wanted something that could be used for a while
Here is the result:
The frame is 1x2 (.75"x1.5") boards around the cockpit area (from right behind my back to my feet, 4' in other words), nailed together with an air nailer (1.5 inch brads). This short frame was then planked with lath (low quality 1.5"x.25" boards, generally used for supporting plaster). The ends (which stick 4' beyond the center frame) are all lath, held in shape by a single bulkhead of 3" extruded polystyrene insulation board (which I had flying around from an old project years ago). These bulkheads are the reason for the "scalloped" look to the sides, the cover pulled the lath in between the cockpit framing and the bulkheads.
Once the frame was finished I covered it with a cheap painters drop cloth (taped on with clear packing tape), and wrapped that with shrink wrap (pallet stretch wrap). The shrink wrap worked OK as a waterproof cover, until I was careless beaching it and punched a hole in the bottom. After that I added a layer of clear vinyl and more shrink wrap to hold everything in place.
Sitting by the driveway:
View inside the cockpit:
My response to my sister telling me to "smile" (crappy camera, I have my tongue out and am making a face):
I made some errors while building that raised the price by about double. If I was to build another here is what I would do different:
Forget the lath, I should have made the whole thing from 1x2s. Basically all I would have needed was to make the frame full length with more stringers down the sides and along the bottom. 1x2s are cheap, far cheaper than lath.
I should have used bunker plastic instead of the vinyl and drop cloth. Bunker plastic is heavy duty plastic used to cover bunker silos. It is very heavy and strong, plus black on one side, white on the other. It would have been easy to get a modest amount of used stuff (plenty to cover several kayaks) from area farmers for free.
I need to find a better way to secure the ends of the shrink wrap, bonding it with a heat gun would probably do. Actually clear packing tape works surprisingly well for small fixes, even below the water line.
The current design has too much freeboard, making it handle like a freighter in wind and requiring higher lifts when paddling.
The hull shape (a simple trapezoid) has low initial stability (it feels tippy) but high secondary stability (it's really hard to actually tip over), I would prefer more initial stability, but sometimes I like like it better this way, hard to decide...
I figure that building another would only cost about $50, pretty reasonable for something like this.