There are many kayak building sites out there that are much more detailed than mine. A good place to start is the CLC web site. There you will find building tips, their builders' forum, and links to other builders' sites. These wooden kayaks are built using the so-called stitch and glue method which involves stitching together plywood panels of the correct shape using copper wire and then strengthening and holding the shape by encapsulating the hull in epoxy-impregnated fiberglass cloth. It is for this reason that the wags out there like to call it the slop and goop method. In any case, if you do not already know the ins and outs of working with epoxy, you will have learned them by the time you are finished with your first kayak.

workbench

scarf

tent

sheer

The West River 18 is eighteen feet long (hence the name), so I set up a couple 4x8 sheets of plywood with a foot or so gap between them on some sawhorses as my workbench until the hull became self supporting. The plywood is only 1/6" thick and is quite floppy at this stage, so having large surfaces on which to position the pieces is helpful. The kits come with precut panels of okoume plywood. These pieces themselves came from 4x8 sheets of plywood and need to be joined together into longer pieces if one is to end up with a boat more than eight feet long. (There are, however, quite a number of designs out there for boats that can be built from one or two sheets of plywood.) The plywood is tapered at the location of the joints which you epoxy together resulting in what you hope as a first time builder are some strong scarf joints. At this point you need to align the pieces very carefully and make sure the joints don't slip once you have the pieces positioned. The WR18 has four panels per side (it is called a multichined hull for this reason -- other models are single chined, with basically just a bottom plank (garboard) and side plank (sheer)) and each panel is composed of two or three pieces, so you get to do quite a lot of scarfs right from the get go. I started my project in September, so I needed to supply some additional thermal energy to get the chemical reaction going between the epoxy resin and the hardener. I bought one of those oil-filled electric radiant heaters (no flame sources for me, thank you) and covered the work with a plastic tarp to help trap warm air. Positioning the heater beneath the gap between my plywood workbench halves lets the hot air up to the top.) Once the panels have been glued up, the topmost planks are attached to what are called the sheer clamps, which are nothing more than eighteen foot (yes, these have scarf joints, too) pieces of wood that are rectangular in cross section. When the time comes, the deck will be attached to the hull at this point, so you need something substantial to hold it all together.

stitch

bulkheads

passenger

ring bulkhead

The planks that make up the hull must be temporarily joined to each other in a process called stitching. This involves drilling approximately 720 1/16" diameter holes along the edges of the panels. Enjoy this because it is one of two woodworking operations involved in putting the kayak together (if you cut your own panels using plans, that is the third). Copper wire is put through pairs of holes on adjacent panels, then twisted to bring the panels together. Do that approximately 360 times and, voila, when you tighten those wires up the hull takes its shape. This is actually a pretty cool thing to see if you have never done it before. Very satisfying. Adding the bulkheads at their proper locations really helps, too. You spend quite some time making sure the hull is symmetric and straight because after the next step you don't get to change it again. Ever. Next you put epoxy in the joints between panels in the spaces between the wires. Very time consuming. Very messy. If you are going to finish the hull "bright" you need to be very careful about staining the panels with the epoxy/wood flour mixture. After these "tabs" cure you get to cut all 360 of your stitches out and tab those locations too. At this point you can let smaller passengers test cargo compartments if desired. The WR18 uses two ring, or formaing, bulkheads in the fore and aft storage compartments. If you are going to use your kayak for long trips these things are intensely annoying because they limit your ability to cram stuff in there. Other builders have *not* epoxied these into place and have taken them out after glassing the hull. I didn't find out about that option until after mine were permanently in place, so I resorted to making the openings in the rings larger. The kayak has not sunk as a result (yet).

cockpit

deck

tip scarf

butt joint

Sand the tabs. Glass the hull. (I told you this was not very detailed...) I painted the cockpit of my kayak with oil-based enamel paint. This helps me gauge when my feet are wearing through into the epoxy but hopefully not all the way through the glass and into the hull. It is not too slippery. Putting the deck on is actually pretty fun. Before installing the deck you need to plane the sheer clamp at an appropriate angle so the fore and aft decks can be cambered. This is the second and final bit of woodworking involved. Make sure your plane is sharp. There are many versions of the deck installation procedure. Some people have designed techniques so that they do not need to use the ring shank nails to hold it down. Others use the nails but don't want to look at them, so they paint up over the top of the hull by about an inch. I wanted to look at them and I wanted an unpainted rub strip so I was pretty particular about getting the spacing all measured out and trying not to bend the heads over. There are spots where I was not all that successful if you get up close and look. Guess what? The fore deck is over eight feet long, so there is a scarf joint at the tip. There are smaller butt joints at the widest point of the cockpit supported by blocks of wood. If carefully done, these can be "nearly invisible" but not really so. The anal retents among us devise ways of disguising these joints...

badge dam

name

nameplate

deck glass

...I covered them up with some badges and a nameplate I made out of sapele and beech veneers. The veneers are only 1/32" thick but will leave a visible bump in the finish if you do not take some care in blending them in. First, I attached the veneers with some slightly thickened epoxy -- if you put too much silica thickener in there the color will be off relative to your bright deck, so be careful. You can hold the different veneer pieces together using packing tape (3M brand works well -- beware bargain brands that may adhere to the epoxy). Packing tape will hold them to the hull until cured. Then I created little blue tape (3M again) dams about 1/4" from the edges of the veneers. Use unthickened epoxy to saturate the veneers from the top (be patient, let the air bubbles work their way out) and use packing tape to cover the 1/4" space from the blue tape to the veneer edge -- capillary action will prevent the epoxy from running out of the dams and when it has cured there will be little "ramps" of epoxy from the veneer "down" to the level of the deck that ease the transition. I named the kayak Waegflota which is an old English word for boat that means "wave floater". I used a laser printer to print the name on a piece of rice paper (use a regular sheet of paper to support it -- go ahead, ask me how I know why this is necessary) and laid that on top of the veneers during the dam building procedure. The rice paper becomes transparent when saturated with epoxy. The toner does not bleed. When it comes time to glass the deck it helps to protect the hull from epoxy runoff. In order to feather the deck glass into the hull glass, it also helps to have a nice straight line to work with. This can be achieved by running packing tape from bow to stern about one inch below the sheer (the boundary can be made easier to see by running a piece of blue tape along the top edge of the packing tape before you wet out the glass). When the deck glass is still "green" (partially cured, but still plastic) you can run a razor blade along the top edge of the packing tape and cut away the excess cloth. Then sand and scrape your way to a feathered transition.

rub strip

hatch cover

hatch cover

end pour

Some people like rub strips, others find they add unnecessary weight. I wanted one just because I like how they look. They also help deflect waves from washing up over the deck a bit. I scarfed my rub strips from a piece of 3/4" ash that I ripped to 3/16" thickness. After the scarfs cured, I stacked the noodly strips side by side and planed a taper starting 3 or 4 feet from each end -- stacking them helps get the same shape on each side, though there are not too many views where you can see them at the same time. It is also nice to taper the *thickness* of the strips near the bow and stern. I did this by sanding them a bit after they were installed. Some people use brads and epoxy to hold the rub strips in place. If you have oodles of clamps you can do without the brads. I wouldn't even think of trying to do both rub strips at once. It is worth the extra time to avoid the hassle of wrestling with two slippery noodles simultaneously. I wanted flush hatch covers for the kayak which means a whole lot of hooting and hollering to get the shape correct. I bought the CLC flush hatch kit which actually turned out not to be that useful for me. YMMV. I ended up using internal bungie cords to hold down the covers rather than the six or so rotating tabs for each hatch that are part of the kit which require drilling through the deck. I was extra careful cutting out the hatch openings and was able to use those pieces for the covers. After a couple iterations, their shapes are still not quite right, but close enough for me at this point. I hadn't really realized how long eighteen feet was until it was time for the endpours which strengthen the bow and stern (and add some weight, so go easy on the epoxy at this point). I needed a place to put the kayak into a vertical position -- what better use for a pergola than as a kayak stand. Yes, the pergola is nine feet tall, and, no, the house is not just fifteen feet tall -- that'd be geometric perspective in action in that photo.

flush hatch

rigging/badge

bow/strip

bow/name

kayak

From there on it was a lot of sanding and finishing and fitting out. I used one part polyurethane paint. That was a real treat -- keeping a wet edge was darn near impossible. Use the *white* rollers not the yellow ones or you'll get a less than delightful orange peel finish. The bungies for the flush hatches had not been installed at this point which is why the covers are proud of the decks. The deck rigging is anchored through the deck. Yes, some water does get in there because I did not seal the slots with anything other than the webbing itself. It is best not to use a silicone sealant of any sort because when it comes time to refinish the varnish it will wreak havoc with the wettability of the varnish. Overall, I think I put about 90 hours into the kayak which is more than twice as much as the official estimate. I did some extra things like the flush hatches, rub strips, badges, and through deck rigging that take longer than the standard procedures. I have nothing to compare the kayak's performance to because I have never paddled one before. But it is fast -- I can easily keep up with more experienced paddlers in shorter plastic kayaks.

on the water

on the water some more