Leif and Natalie

The Snail is my second custom design. The first was the Slug, way back around maybe 2012, when I lived in Fort Collins. Somewhat after the fact, I wrote a blog aritcle about that construction . The Slug ended up being very fast but had a lot of problems. After many years, I have learned much and decided to sort of try the design ideas of the Slug again, but with better construction techniques. The differences in technique between the Slug and the Snail Money. The design philosophy If you've read my other articles (who am I kidding? Of course you've read them because my only readers are my mom and my wife and they have read all my articles) you remember that I talked about how nobody interested in boat building really cares about your boat design ideas, so I will try to restrict my comments here to the bare minimum, but there are a couple features that actually impact the construction. First, my general vision for this design was a very fast but stable surf boat. I tried Ben...

So. You have done a little research at the ol' Youtube University, and you are thinking about starting some kind of composites project. ONE CATCH! You just realized that actually you have no idea what you are doing. Your precious youtube videos did a great job of explaining the minutiae of the higher level subtleties in sanding technique or fabric choices, but then you never got any foundational education about the very basics. Good thing I'm here. Let's get beyond basic on resin. The resin is the sticky stuff that hardens and holds the fabric in place. It is the glue. There are tons of types of resins, but there are two main families: epoxy and polyester. (There's vinylester too, and I don't even know how UV cure resins work, but this is supposed to be beyond basic, so the esters are all getting grouped together and everything else is getting ignored. Plus I don't actually know all that much.) When people talk about gel coat, they are talking about a polyester ...

Do you sometimes feel like a cantankerous old man, shaking his fist at the kayak industry? “I could totally build a better playboat than that!” you might yell from your porch, or perhaps “What I want to paddle is the gliss monkey hull with the edges of a skunk rocker!” Are you fed up enough to finally do something? Are you ready to put your money where your mouth is? Well, in that case, prepare for a mind-blowing introduction to the incredible world of homemade composite kayaks. Exact same idea, but for boat design versus boating experience. I'm going to build a Stinger with the rocker profile of the Jed and the bow of a Scud! From SMBC Personally I started building custom composite boats because I am too tall to fit in production boats. I fit in the 2010 Monstar, but it wasn’t comfortable. I also fit in the Fluid Element, but that’s… a  very special case. I needed something short but big. I saw a few other pro paddlers building their own boats, and I figured, hey - how ha...