Greenland Kayak Process
Day 1
Day 2
Days 3 and 4
Days 5 and 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
The Greenland Kayak Building Process Illustrated
This page illustrates the basic steps in building a Greenland kayak.
Our builders are Tony Mullins, to the left and Glen Howard to the right. These pictures are from a class hosted by California Canoe and Kayak at Jack London Square in Oakland.
Building a Greenland kayak takes about nine full days once you have all the materials.
Day 1
Day 1 starts with an asessment of what sort of boat you want, how wide, how long, how heavy, how stable, how fast. And we talk about what you want to use it for.Then we cut the gunwales to length, 16 feet long for a 17 foot boat.
Once we have arranged the gunwale boards so that their grain matches, we nail them face to face so they can be marked as a pair. Among other things, we mark the bow and the stern. In this case, we have also doweled risers to the stern. The risers give the gunwales some upsweep at the ends to stop waves from coming over the deck in the finished boat.
We cut rib mortises on the underside of the gunwales.