Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Free boat plans for building a strip-built baidarka style sea kayak
The forms start at the bow and work backwards. The center of buoyancy is just slightly in front
of form 11. At form 18 the hull tapers in rapidly to make the characteristic truncated stern. I
have not provided drawings for the cockpit, but any oval like shape will work. You will probably
want the back of the cockpit about 14 to 16 inches behind the center of buoyancy. In the
original the cockpit was a flat oval ring with the deck coming up to meet it. I did not copy this
because it would be difficult to strip. Instead the cockpit is sloped down at the sides to match
the slope of the deck.
I have not finalized any plans for the end treatment because they are kind of tricky and would have to be
worked out in place. I would advise carving most of the bow out of a solid chunk of wood one to two inches
thick.
The top picture is profile view of the last two feet of the stern and the lower picture
is the first three feet of the bow. These are drawn out rather crudely, especially the
bow but they are a rough approximation of the original. The Aleuts had a wide
variety of treatments for how they finished of the end. Feel free to be a little
creative. There is a Adobe Acrobat file available of this drawing. The gray lines
above are spaced ever 1/4" out from the centerline and may be useful for creating a
first approximation for a solid stem piece.
Note that the darker blue horizontal line represents the datum waterline. This where the boat will float at a
215 pound total displacement and as such the jaws would tend to catch a lot of weeds. You might want to
change the shape to reduce this problem or scale the boat up so it floats higher.
Note also that these drawings represent the outer surface of the boat where the forms drawings are
"corrected" for a 1/4" skin thickness and will thus be slightly smaller.
This is a top view of the stern and bow. The light blue lines
correspond to the gray lines in the profile view above. Note that in
the above drawing the stern tapers to a sharp edge. This is not
practical and you will want to make it somewhat thicker. The stern
shape here is different from the original, but might be a little easier
to build (not to say it is easy).
I won't make any promises about this design. I have tried to be fairly faithful to the original design, just
fairing it out here and there. But the information I had originally came from measurements of a boat that
was badly damaged. The lines were taken by David Zimmerly and he did some fairing out in an effort to
represent the lines of the original boat, which had to involve a certain amount of guess work. These
drawings and offsets are one step farther removed, and as such may not be worth much. However, I think it
is an interesting boat. It should be quite fast, track very straight, but you may find it very unstable. I suspect
most people will want to scale the design slightly to serve their needs. I apologize for the sparseness of the
information about the bow and stern shape, but what do you expect for nothing. Hopefully, I've provide
enough to get the more adventurous builders started.
Although these drawings are intended for strip-built construction, they may be useful for other techniques as
well.
These plans are provided free for those who want to use them. I reserve all rights to the drawings and the
published offsets. Please do not reproduce any of the provided without my permission. Feel free to make
whatever copies you need in order to build the boat. I would really appreciate any pictures of the finished
product you would like to send me.
I have recently built a new strip built kayak loosely based on this design.
Have Fun!