Interlude: building a Sea Rider SOF

Prior to starting the stripping on the Freedom 15 canoe, I thought I’d try and rig together the frame of a skin-on-frame kayak.

I had come across Tom Yost’s website and found a ton of good information on his SOF construction method, along with several different kayak designs. It’s an unbelievably good source of information. Through a small amount of research and a few emails with Tom Yost, I decided to build his Sea Rider. As I have had this in the back of my mind for some time, I had already purchased nylon and cedar for the kayak. I did this last year while working on the Tern 14 for my wife. I figured that I would want a kayak in case we had a chance to paddle together, and a SOF would be the cheapest and fastest way to build a kayak for myself.

Earlier this year I transferred Tom’s offsets into my CAD program and printed out templates for the stations. I then cut the stations out of some extra 1/2" plywood I had kicking around. This was a bit of a mistake because the plywood turned out to be of very low quality. The surface was so rough that it was difficult to trace the proper outline on the wood, and the wood had a tendancy to grab the saw when cutting which made it difficult to make precise cuts. As well, there ply had a lot of voids in it. I tried to fill in the voids as best as I could with thickened epoxy. So after all of the tracing, cutting and sanding I was almost ready to put the frame together. I also needed to rip the planks for the frame and scarf them together. I started with a 1x8x10’ wrc board and ripped it to make the chines and keel (1x.5x20’) and gunwales (1.5x.5x20’).

My first shot at putting the kayak together went okay. The keel is curved, so I’ll have to fix that before I glue everything together. I may also try to clean up the scarf joints a bit better before continuing.

BTW, I chose the name “Interlude” because that is exactly what this kayak is. It’s an interlude in the building process of the canoe. Pretty imaginative eh.