Introduction:
I was twisting my sister's arm, trying to get her to build a PDRacer.com . She was interested, but wanted to build a small kayak first, something like my flats rat. We were talking about a few building techniques like chine log construction and stitch & glue, but they all seemed to take too much time. Then I rememberd that back in the 1950's, there were a lot of boat plans in Popular Mechanics. A number of them were very simple little boats that used "plank construction" technique, where a 1x12 or similar plank of wood is used for the sides and sometimes the bottom. A couple of examples are the Paddle Pusher and the Wheeled Willie ( page2 page3 page4 ). This is a VERY FAST method of construction, it is as simple as chine log construction, but you don't have to make all the chine logs -- all you do is cut the sides and glue / nail on a bottom. The day after we talked about this type of building, she went to the hardware store and started building a regular flats rat, with plank sides.

I started kicking around the idea of a very small kayak for me, something that was small enough to carry inside my minivan, yet was big enough to carry both me and one daughter. Would use it as a tender for my larger sailboat, and also as a boat to use in the small fishing ponds. A little drawing time later and I discovered that with 2 of the 8' planks, I could make a kayak that was 5'5" long, 32" beam, and a 350 lb load would have 4.5" freeboard left. Wow, that is a lot of load carrying for such a small boat! So the project went on "the list", and it looked like I wasn't going to build it anytime soon.

Then all of a sudden I got the opportunity to help a friend raise a sunken boat. One catch though, the boat was near the shore, but possibly far enough off that the suction hose of a pump wouldn't reach, and we would need a small dinghy to carry the gasoline drain pump near the boat. I didn't have any other boats at the time that would be suitable, so what a perfect opportunity to build this little kayak!

In just 2.5 hours, I was able to put together a basic boat.

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