Wooden Kayak Seat Plans

Product Description

This carved wooden seat will take your strip-planked kayak build to the next level. Nick Schade, designer and builder of Guillemot Kayaks, developed this wooden kayak seat to match his stunning custom-built kayaks.

The seat is functional as well as beautiful: its contoured shape makes it comfortable for long periods without needing to be soft, like an old cast-iron tractor seat.

The seat is constructed by cutting each longitudinal piece to the individual profile shown in the plans, then laminating them together. The shape is then smoothed out by grinding away the steps between the laminations.

These plans include full-size drawings of the profile for each lamination, but there are no instructions for making the seat. Nick has put together a gallery of photos to show his method of building them. This video on shaping a foam seat may also be instructive. Nick now uses a CNC machine to make his seats, which saves a lot of time, but this method of shaping them by hand is exactly how he used to do it.

This is a tricky build, so we strongly advise practising making a seat with inexpensive wood first.

The plans do not include a backrest or mounting instructions. Nick has used several methods of mounting, including simply gluing the seat directly to the bottom of the boat or mounting it on a T-track.