The Strip-Built Sea Kayak "Three Rugged Boats You Can Build" By Nick Schade Published by Ragged Mt Press, a division of McGraw-Hill

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Strip-building is the most flexible, forgiving, and attractive way to build a small wood boat. Professional sea kayak builder Nick Schade presents complete plans and measurements for three kayaks:

Strip building is the craft of turning a pile of thin strips of wood into a high-performance, durable boat. It is a great way to make a boat. It produces beautiful results that are also lightweight and strong. It may not be the quickest method to make a boat, but the individual steps are really not hard. It is a matter of shaping relatively small pieces of wood so they interlock tightly. The goal is to cover the boat with wood, and this simple idea permits a lot of room for creativity. Below are some pages that will describe and show some of what can be done

A minimalist boat for light paddlers

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A stitch and glue boat will typically use three or four sheets of 4mm Occume marine plywood. With careful cutting you may be able to be more efficient.

Strips

For a strip-built kayak a good rule of thumb is 2 board feet of western red cedar or other softwood for each foot of boat length. A board foot is a volume of wood 12" long x 12" wide by a nominal 1" thickness. Most wood you will buy is planed down to 3/4" thick or even 11/16" for some cedar and redwood.

To get a little bit more specific it takes just under 18 strips to cover a 12 inch wide area. In other words to completely cover one square foot of surface area on a boat you will need 18 linear feet of strips. If you are looking at a design with a surface area of 50 square feet you will need approximately 900 linear feet of strips. This does not leave much room for errors so you will want to include some extra.

One of the biggest benefits to building a small boat with narrow strips is how accessible it is. While it looks intimidating, taking a bundle of small strips and wrapping them around a set of forms really is a matter of patience and not one of specialized skills. The tool requirement is minimal and the technique is very tolerant of mistakes. If you fail to make perfect joints between strips, the epoxy and fiberglass will fill them in and seal the mistakes.

If you are looking for a way to mass-produce wooden boats, strip-building is probably not the best choice. It is a time consuming method. More traditional methods of boat building tend to be quicker when performed by experience craftsmen, but that speed and ability to build a usable boat is largely dependent on the skill of the builder. The strength and water-tight integrity of the finished traditionally-built vessel is a result of the ability of the builder to make tight and sound joints. This takes skill and practice.

"Strip-Building" is the art of bending many, small, thin strips of wood around forms to create a boat shape. The wood is covered with fiberglass cloth and epoxy resin then removed from the forms and the inside is fiberglassed. This method allows a lot of design freedom because just about any shape may be produced. The results are very strong and stiff because of the composite construction with wood surrounded by fiberglass and sealed in epoxy. By varying the thickness of the wood and the amount of fiberglass applied the boat can be supremely light or extremely tough.

The fiberglass cloth be

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A strip built boat is made of small strips of wood so if you were wondering where the name came from, now you know. The method is often called cedar strip, because the wood used is typically cedar. It does not have to be. Any straight grained, light-weight wood can be used. I have used redwood, pine, and mahogany as well as Alaskan cedar, western red cedar, northern white cedar, and atlantic white cedar.

The reason you want straight grained is because you will be bending the wood around forms. This stress will break wood with poor grain. For this reason you also want to avoid knots. They cause a weak spot and are also hard to smooth when you start fairing the boat. You want light weight, because you want a light boat. If you don't then ignore this advice.