Boatbuilding Tips and Tricks

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 4, 2009

Innovative Clamping Technique for Boat Building

I'm sure you've seen photos of huge arrays of wood clamps when people are building boats and though, "Wow, I couldn't afford all of those clamps if I ever wanted to build a boat!" Well, don't worry. there are ways around this. This Huntington Harbor kayak builder scrounged all of the materials to build his kayak, mostly from the dump, and were he lives (the Canadian Arctic) there are no inexpensive tool stores or swap meets to pick up a bunch of inexpensive clamps, so he made due with scrounged materials. Here you can see he used simple polypropylene rope tied around the chine log, then with short sticks, he twisted the rope pulling the frame elements into place. This is commonly called a "Spanish Windlass."

So, see you don't have to have lots of fancy tools to do a great job on easy to build boat plans like those available at Spira International. Inc. Here's how his boat came out: