> If you are seriously looking at making several boats you should consider
> the amount of building time, and then look at building some skin on frame
> kayaks from the designs in George Putz's book on canvas covered boats.
> "Wood and Canvas Kayak Building". Once you build the forms you
> can very easily reuse them for several more boats. The second and third
> boats will go together faster, too. You can pop a frame of of the forms
> and start to assemble a second one while the first one is being covered
> with fabric and being painted, elsewhere. His construction methods are
> simple, and most of the wowk can be done by kids with hand tools. If your
> 'crew' is old enough to drive some screws, or nail in 1 inch brads or use
> a stapler, then they can have the pleasure of helping build their own
> boats. These canvas covered kayaks are light in weight, so they can carry
> their own boats, too !. As for cost, there is a recent post from a person
> who is compleitng one. He spent about $250 for it. Since about $40 worht
> of materials goes into the forms, and can be reused, another boat would be
> about $210. I suppose you could buy gallons of paint instead of quarts,
> and bring that price down even more. As for time savings, you can set up
> your saw and rip 7 to 10 strips of wood for this boat in about an
> hour(that would make most of the frame) Once your saw is set up, though,
> if you keep cutting for another half hour, though, you could easily end up
> with enough wood for 4 or 5 kayaks. You make most of your sawdust on the
> first day, and just have to sweep up the big pile once.

> Again, if you want a shorter boat you can space the forms closer. If you
> are looking at making 4 boats you might end up spending $800 to $900
> total, and have some beautiful, traditional boats. If you go with stitch
> and glue designs you might look at Chris Kulczyki's book, which has
> reduced size plans for three different boats. The first one in the book,
> the Yare, only uses two sheets of plywood and goes together rather
> quickly. Since you are working from plans, once you enlarge them you can
> cut several sheets of plywood to shape at one time.

> Just some thoughts for you. Hope they help.

> Paul G. Jacobson

I am the one that is about to finish a Putz skin-on-frame kayak. The first on did cost me $250. A second boat would cost around $150, I have enough left over paint and monel staples to do one more boat. If I were to do multiple boats, they would average around $175. If I used cheaper materials I could get the cost around $125 per boat. It is easy but takes more time than stitch and glue boats. I haven't paddled this boat yet but I am expecting to have it in the water this week. I will put a post up on how it performs.

Mike