Wood And Canvas Kayak Building

Wood And Canvas Kayak Building
George Putz
International Marine/McGraw-Hill, 1990
ISBN 0-07-155939-6    

This book provides instruction in building a simple wood-framed, canvas-covered kayak. The techniques described are easy to follow and avoid the need to do steam bending.

The Putz frame is simple and is based on truss construction techniques. This results in a functional kayak, but the technique could be improved a bit to enhance stiffness- and strength-to-weight ratios.

While interesting from a historical perspective and offering a potentially different construction technique, this book is probably not the first one to buy if you want a skin on frame kayak. A more elegantly-framed kayak will result from following the instructions in Morris, Starr, Cunningham or Petersen.