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 ...

Based on my wealth of experience in patching two or three cracks in my Element, I decided that I was fully qualified and ready to build my own boat. The finished product, just 3 short years later The plan was to design a boat from scratch, because it was becoming increasingly difficult to find production boats that fit me. I liked the Element a lot, but it was just impossible to paddle in a hole, and it was also a little tough on highly concave waves. The long bow tends to hit the water if the wave is really curved. The design I decided to make was basically an Element without a long bow. I decided that I would make it a touch wider, like maybe an inch, and also give it a tiny bit more stern rocker, as well as a shorter and wider stern. I was going to keep the aggressive flared rails. That was where a lot of people raised their eyebrows, since it seems crazy. I was thinking back to the Liquidlogic Vision, which had apparently been acceptable in a hole, despite having some pretty ...

My actual introduction to working with composites came when I broke my composite Element. Well, actually that's not true. My real introduction to composites came when my parents used to build paddles and boats in a workshop out back when I was a young kid. Well, actually, I would get in trouble if I tried to go play in the workshop, since resin is toxic, and they didn't want me to start having liver issues before turning 10. So I suppose my real introduction to composites was when I built a composite deck plate with the advice of Jeremy Lauks. But that thing was a piece of junk. Anyway, the point here is that I was paddling a composite Element on the Slave river in 2011, when there was a huge ton of wood coming down the river. I hit a couple stumps, which put a bunch of little cracks in the stern and a few other areas. However, the big one that finally made me get down to business was when I tried an airscrew on a shallow wave, landed upsidedown, and opened the bow up like an...

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...