Hi Chris,

I'll try to answer some of you questions. First, welcome! This kayak building thing is addictive as hell, I can't imagine a time when I won't be either building a boat or at least thinking about building a boat.

1. Cost of wood: I found some planks of 1 1/4" x 9" x15' western red cedar in a dumpster during a demolition of a building near to where I work. If you hunt around you can do it on the cheap, remember, you don't need all the strips to be full-length. You don't have to use expensive timber, find out what gets grown and milled locally, if it's light weight and a nice colour it'll probably be ok. Ask here about wood types. There is a company near where I live who do kitchen remodelings, their dumpster is always full of old kitchen cupboard doors and cabinets -good form material. Places like that don't mind if you take their scrap as they have to pay to have the dumpster emptied, just ask first and don't leave a mess. Oh, and watch-out for guys throwing more stuff in.

For machinery look-up equipment hire in your phone book, you'll probably be able to hire a saw & router for a day or a weekend at a reasonable cost. You could reasonably expect to rip and mill your strips in a weekend.

2. Forms, most people don't seem to have much problem lofting the forms. Be aware there are errors in the offsets in Nick's book, you'll find the corrections here: http://www.guillemot-kayaks.com/Book/Erratta.html

3. If you don't bead & cove you'll have to learn how to plane a rolling bevel. This sounds tricky to me. a set of B&C router bits will cost you about $40, As I said you'll probably be able to hire or borrow the router.

4. Boston's on the other side of the planet to me, can't help you here.

5. We don't really have basements here in Australia, pity. I guess they're a cold weather thing (if I want to see ice I gotta look in the refrigerator). Oh yeah, make sure you'll be able to get the finished boat out of the basement!

You can keep the costs down by scrounging materials and finding cheap suppliers, all this takes time tho, and wouldn't be as much fun as (I'm imagining here) going out and laying out the cash and coming home with everything you need would be. We're trying to save for our first home at the moment, so for me it's do it cheap or don't do it at all.

Hope this helps,

Paul.