"Kenneth McClelland" wrote in
news:KSn2d.5920$VV2.5405@trndny06:

Thanks all for your input. I do have some woodworking experience and
pretty good patience for long projects but I'm starting to think - what
the heck, build a S&G first - more boats = more fun. Fortunately I
have the storage space for more than one and I might even talk my wife
into coming kayaking with me if I have a spare boat around. If not my
son will eventually grow into it.

That's the spirit. To offer another perspective, I have built both a stitch
-n-glue (from a kit) and a cedar strip boat (from plans). For the latter, I
milled my own strips and essentially built from scratch. Someone suggested
that I cedar strip boat was more expensive. In my case, I spent several
hundred dollars more building the S&G boat than the cedar strip. On the
other hand, I was able to use some of the tools that I bought to build the
S&G boat for the stripper.

The stripper took considerably longer to build than the S&G but neither is
something that you're going to knock off on a weekend and it's worth taking
your time and doing it right.

Several people have suggested building a S&G first but a lot of people have
built cedar strip boats as their first and fortunately there are a lot of
resources that will help you do so. When I built mine I put together a
binder of printouts from various web pages (including quite a few from the
oneoceankayak site). Nick Schade's boat building forum (and the rest of his
site at http://www.guillemot-kayaks.com/Building/Building.html) is pretty
much essential. The Newfound Woodworks and several others all contain good
information. One thing you'll discover is there is no one correct way to
build a boat so using a variety of sources will help you find the best way
to build the boat that you want. There are also quite a few different
designs available. Nick's Guillemot's are very popular, the One Ocean boats
look nice, as do the Redfish boats and several others. I built Jay Babina's
Outer Island.

In addition to web resources I recommend Nick Schade's "Strip built
kayak..." book. There are others. I also bought a copy of the video from
homegrownboats.com which I found very helpful.

One area where it might pay to build an "easier" boat first is in working
with fiberglass and epoxy resin. I didn't find the building process on the
cedar strip boat the be that difficult. The process is very forgiving,
probably more so than building a S&G boat if you build from plans.

Gather as much information as you can, pick a design, then buy the materials
and start building. Having a friend that will cut cedar strips for you is a
great advantage.