Thomas Yost's Yostwerks Information - Reworked

We admire the excellent work done by Thomas Yost. He has developed and published very useful information describing a lot of different kayaks designed and built by himself. All these boats can be built by anybody with ease and few money. And all his information is for free.

We created the pages you find here with the emphasis to keep, and to protect his great work from vanishing. As a little "added value" we reorganized the information given by Thomas in a way we think will ease its further use.

All designs made by Thomas address good performance, ease of construction, and low cost.  His designs are narrow, shallow, and light weight. Many of his designs are based on traditional Greenland kayaks and Aleut baidarkas. All his boats - with the exception of the inflatable/foldable ones - can be built as foldable or non-foldable. The foldables are built from High Densitity Polyethylene and Aluminum, the non-foldables from woodstrip/fiberglass or plywood (stitch & glue). Both boat types are covered with lightweight PVC coated tissue.

Here you can find a catalog (.pdf, 9.9 MB) we put together that shows all designs.

All designs, all plans, and all instructions shown herein are "free".

The designs are structured by type, and by the intended purpose (performance, touring, children/small paddler) within each type

• Foldable Boats
  High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) cross sections, aluminum stringers, lightweight PVC skin
  Building time about 100 hrs, building costs about US$ 500.-
  Assembly time less than 30 minutes
• Non-Foldable Boats
  
Based in part of the techniques developed by George Dyson
Wood cross sections, wood stringers, lightweight PVC skin
Building time about 100 hrs, building costs about US$ 500.-
• Foldable / Inflatable Boats
4 to 6 sponsons, 3 aluminum stringers, 2 cross beams, lightweight PVC skin
Building time about 50 hrs, building costs about US$ 250.-

Please be aware of the fact that the costs mentioned above are taken from Thomas Yost's manual containing US American prices. Building one of his boats can be way more expensive, e.g. in Europe.