Materials

The boat goes together from 3 sheets of 4mm Okoume marine plywood and a half sheet of the 6mm. It ain't cheap (~ $70 a sheet), but it's very high quality. Because I'm a cheap bastard, I was tempted to use lauan at $10 a sheet, but if you've ever used lauan, you know that it's full of voids and the filler between the plies is flimsy wooden styrofoam. Of course, Allen's boat uses rigid foam between epoxy and glass and it's stupendously strong, and given that most of the strength derives from the layup of epoxy and glass, I suspect that lauan would work just fine. But word from the CLC shop tips page nudged me up the food chain. Since I'll be putting a few hundred bucks worth of epoxy, glass, and fittings into the boat, I decided to throw in for good wood. I got it from the folks at Edensaw in Port Townsend, WA, along with some clear straight grain fir for the sheer clamps.

O.K., so here's really the way it fell out. Uncle Stinky bought this wood from Edensaw so that he could build a kayak at the same time as Crescent, but with his many projects in the works, this one didn't come to fruition before his travels continued. He generously left the wood in the greenhouse for us to use. Thus, I'm making a boat from really quality wood. Those who know Uncle Stinky know that he never never never buys cheap shite - only the best. In this case, Joubert Ply.

The Joubert seal signifies that it meets or exceeds British Standard 1088. It's registered with Lloyds of London to be free of voids, be of uniform thickness and be glued together with uniform glue spread and pressure, and to be low in formaldehyde out-gassing - as if I give a shite about out-gassing.  But if it's good enough for Lloyd and for Uncle Stinky, I'm sure it'll work for me.