This blog describes how I am building a baidarka style kayak from Rob Macks at Laughing Loon kayaks.
I've already built two other kayaks - a Wood Duck 12 hybrid from CLC and a Petrel Play strip kayak from Guillemot Kayaks.
You can find the Wood Duck build log here Wood Duck at Fyne Boats "Petrel Play at Fyne Boats" and the Petrel Play
I've been paddling the petrel play for a couple of years and find its a great boat in all sorts of conditions. But, I've been bitten by the boat building bug and I've been thinking about another boat. What am I looking for? Well, slightly longer for speed, although the Petrel Play is fine for normal cruising at 3kts or so, as others have commented on the CLC forum I find I start to get left behind the longer boats if they step on it. Maybe something that tracks better for longer paddles. The Petrel Play is quite easy to turn, and although it has a skeg, it can sometimes be tiring on a windy day to stay on track. It will have to be wood of course, and to make it interesting I plan on using thinner strips without cove and bead. I'm also going to try and build it lighter than my Petrel Play which comes in at 18kg, aiming for 12kg.
I could of course just get another greenland style boat - there are a lot of very good designs out there, but something different also piqued my interest. I came across the baidarka designs from Rob Macks of LaughingLoon kayaks Laughing Loon and the shooting star caught my eye which is 16'6", but as I only have a standard garage and can just about fit a 16 foot kayak in there, Rob suggested a Dark Star which has an overall design length of 15' 6".
The plans were ordered from Rob and they arrived a week or so later from the US together with the instruction book, and some designs for wood paddles I also ordered at the same time. The plans come on two A1 sheets and some A3 sheets for the smaller parts. As per the conditions printed on the sheets I had some copies made so I could cut out the templates for use when tracing the forms.
The wood was bought from a supplier in Hastings in Sussex in the UK, but he is sadly no longer in business. The design calls for 3/16" western red cedar and I also got some tulip wood for accents. The strips don't have cove and bead. There was a nice selection of colours in the wood, so my plan is to have a mainly lighter colour hull with some very light accents and some darker strips around the waterline. The deck will be mainly darker wood with some very dark and light accents. There is enough wood so that most of it will be full length strips, though I will scarf some sections to cut down waste.
Rob's suggested order of construction is to build the tricky bow and stern sections first. These are based on the skin on frame boats that inspired this design. The bow is made of some hardwood lamination and a carved wood block.
Here I've glued the shaped laminations and I'm adding a thin accent strip.
For the stern section, first the stern forms are cut out and glued together to make tghe mould for the stern.
. Then the stern strips are bent using a heat gun and attached to the forms with hot glue. Lots of clamps needed here.
Unlike the internal strong back used on the Petrel Play, Rob Mack's designs use an external strong back, so the first task was to assemble this strong back from 12mm plywood. I did use the internal strong back from the Petrel Play build as an internal beam for the new strong back. I had B&Q cut the full sheet of plywood for me as they can produce really straight cuts and accurate measuring.
The forms were cut from 12mm plywood. Setting these up with the brackets, getting them level, measured and adjusted and then getting some left over strips to check for fairness took a long time, but as Rob and others say, this is an important step to make sure the hull and deck are fair.
I also built a table to work on and attached some wheels so I could move it around the garage. I'm working in a standard garage and I can fit the 16' boat length with enough room to get round one end, so wheels make it much easier to move around, and get it outside when I need to get at other stuff in the garage.
Here I've attached the bow and stern forms and started adding strips.
I used hot glue to attach the strips to the forms and there are areas when I've used additional little scraps hot glued to make sure that the edges are tight against each other. All bevels are hand planed with my little block plane, this only takes a few minutes per strip.
