Melissa wrote in
:

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Hi Wilf,

On 5 Mar 2005 12:28:17 -0800, you wrote:

Having said that, however, I love these sites, and I love stories of
people who can actually do real work with their hands.

I'm preparing to build my first skin on frame boat, but this past
summer, I finally finished building a wood/fiberglass Stitch & Glue
boat from a kit; an Arctic Hawk, built from a Chesapeake Light Craft
(CLC) kit. Before I built this boat, the only wood working
experience I had was a chessboard I built in a Jr. High School shop
class! Here are some pictures of the boat I built all by myself:

http://photobucket.com/albums/v61/watersprite/Kayak/

If *I* can do that, I'm sure you can! :-)

Mellissa's story is not unique. I know of two other women that built a
kayak (also from a kit) even though they had essentially no woodworking
experience whatsoever. One of them built a real nice Pygmy Coho in her
living room and there was a woman from NYC that had a web site up showing
the building of a S&G kayak in a second story apartment.

Having built a stitch-n-glue boat from a kit and also a cedar strip kayak
(http://caddis.mannlib.cornell.edu/paddle/outerisland) I didn't find the
cedar strip boat to be much more difficult. It was a more tedious, and took
considerably longer to build, but working with cedar strips is very
forgiving. I also ended up spending less on the cedar strip boat (about
$750) than on the S&G kit, primarily because I was able to use some of the
required tools that I had bought for the first boat (mostly a random orbital
sander, and lots of clamps).

Mellissa mentions the traditional skin-on-frame boats that can be built very
economically. Here's another option: http://yostwerks.com/MainMenu.html

That is most likely the next boat I will build, and I'll probably build two
of them. One for me, and one that my son can use when he gets old enough to
paddle (and that my nieces can use till then).