A plywood frame and stringer construction skin on frame is surely the quickest and least expensive, although a traditional construction might be as inexpensive if you are good at scrounging wood. Certainly a ply and stringer is faster.

Check out Tom Yost's site, www.yostwerks.com, which has already been mentioned.

You can save time and money by lashing the frame together, rather than gluing with epoxy. Not buying epoxy will save about $80. You can lash with artificial sinew, which is basically wax coated flat nylon.

Any reasonable lumberyard (other than the big blue or big orange box) should be able to order you "marine" ply, which is often AB immersion rated. True marine ply is okoume wood, but regular immersion ply is typically fir, and could be had for maybe $60-80 a sheet as opposed to $130 for okoume. I used select yellow pine boards to rip my stringers, and admittedly that was expensive, but not unbearably so. Don't worry about painting the ply with epoxy - hey, it's immersion rated, and the inside of the kayak isn't really all that wet, unless you're practicing rolling, and it won't be wet for long.

You can make a tighter skin with nylon or dacron from George Dyson or www.skinboats.org, and coat with inexpensive Zar polyurethane varnish (or almost any paint, for that matter.) I'm not sure of the cost of the vinyl Tom uses, as I always knew I was going to sew and coat the skin.

Go for it, you'll have a blast, Tom's designs are all very nice, and you've got plenty of people here and www.qajaqusa.org's forums to help you!

Brian

: Hey, I'm a senior in high school, and for my senior project, I'm
: building a kayak. I had a few questions. First of all, how many
: total hours does a kayak usually take to finish? Second, how
: hard is it to start from scratch. A friend suggested a kit, bit
: that's a tad out of my price range, so I decided I would build
: it from scratch. And third, is there any good supplier (wood,
: materials, etc.) in connecticut, or around northwest
: Connecticut?
: Thank you

: And like I said, I'm new to this, so any other advice would be
: greatly appreciated.