Skin-on-frame: The easiest boats you'll ever build.

My buddy Anton has just finished two beautiful new skin-on-frame kayaks, they're strapped to the top of his pickup and he's bouncing down a dusty gravel road in the mountains of Montana. Every few miles he leans out the window glancing up and back, letting his eyes linger on the translucent fabric covered framework. It's hard not to look at the intricate wooden skeletons glowing inside the gold tinted coverings. He stares just a bit too long and the Toyota drifts off the roadbed. The truck rolls over crushing the cab and landing on it's side. Shaken but uninjured, Anton scrambles out of the shattered window and counts his blessings, wincing at the totaled truck. The kayaks, of course, must be crushed as well. As he waits for help curiosity compels him to examine the kayaks closer and he finds that one kayak is undamaged and the other has two cracked ribs and two snapped deck beam tenons. Not bad for suffering a direct hit from two tons of airborne steel. The kayaks had crushed in the cab.

There are a lot of reasons to build a skin-on-frame boat, but durability is generally not the first one people consider. When I send people out of my shop with a new kayak they are invariably paranoid about puncture. "Look," I tell them, "here's a roll of duct tape, if you have any problems just patch it up and bring it back to the shop and we'll re-skin it together." It's been three years and over one hundred kayaks and I'm still waiting for that first person to show up with a hole it the skin.

As an avid kayak aficionado I can never have enough kayaks. There is a kayak for every use and each one is important to me. I'd say, conservatively, that for the serious paddler you need at least seven or eight different boats just to get by. At two to four thousand dollars a pop this can get expensive in a hurry, not to mention the dough for specialized gear. At age 25 I was close to being forced into homelessness just to support my kayak habit. Luckily I discovered skin-on-frame kayak building.

Compared to plywood, strip built, or a conventionally glass molded kayak, a skin-on-frame boat takes a fraction of the time to construct, requires no bulky molds, and employs very little money in materials cost. You literally tie, peg, or nail some sticks together, sew a skin on, paint the boat and go paddling. On occasion I'll meet another builder with a fresh strip-built on top of his car, the kayak is a work of art, glowing with bright work and fresh varnish. "Nice boat!" I congratulate, and I'm not lying, I know how long this person has spent glassing and sanding the tiny strips. That sort of tenacity is impressive. "You too," they beam in return, "How long did you spend building yours?" "Oh, about 5 days." I reply, and as my new friend stares in horror I shove the kayak off the roof rack letting it bounce off the pavement, I reach down and pick the kayak up with one hand and the look of shock is replaced with another question, "How much does it weigh?" "About twenty-five pounds." By the end of our chat it's likely that I've converted another homebuilder to the worlds oldest form of boat building.

Around ten thousand years ago a wave of hardy migrants were moving eastward from the Siberian peninsula. They flourished in the harsh maritime climate of the Gulf of Alaska, subsisting primarily on seals, otters, whales, and fish caught from skin-on-frame kayaks. These animals provided light, heat, food, clothing, tools, and most importantly, the coverings for the small kayaks they hunted from. Traveling in kayaks and a larger Dory shaped paddle boat called an Umiak, they colonized the Aleutian Islands, and Kodiak Island, but were repelled in the south by the fierce Southwest Alaskan canoe peoples, established thousands of years before in earlier migrations. Colonization continued in successive waves, northward and eastward, along the Alaskan coastline, across the frozen Canadian Shield, and finally ending on the eastern shores of Greenland. Inuit peoples were forced to survive in natures most inhospitable landscape by not only being tough enough to survive winters without light and temperatures below –50 degrees Fahrenheit, but also by being clever enough to solve the technical challenges of survival in a land of scarce raw materials. Their enduring legacy is the skin-on-frame watercraft. Light enough to be carried over land but strong enough to withstand rough use in the pack ice these boats are an impressive testament to the limits of human ingenuity.

Today a new breed of skin-on-frame boat builders is carrying the tradition into a modern context. Across the globe backyard builders are rediscovering skin-on-frame technology as a means to construct a beautiful boat in a global climate where resources scarcity is becoming a reality once again. There are established kayak building clubs in Japan, North America, New Zealand, and across Europe, as well as countless individuals working alone in backyards and basements, building traditionally influences kayaks, row boats, canoes, and just about anything one can imagine including sailboats. The technology is compelling because it's easy, fun, and relatively inexpensive. Skin-on-frame is a low risk medium that allows the small boat imagineer the freedom to sculpt hulls and put them on the water quickly. This may be skin-on-frames' most addictive element; with so little invested in each boat anyone can become a boat designer through trial and error, and of course anyone with a little spare time can own a fleet of small boats. I can't think of a better definition of happiness.

How to build a skin-on-frame boat, part two of this article