: Investigating to build my first kayak. How much can I expect to pay for
: Epoxy/fiberglass cloth? Thanks for your help!

A lot depends on the type of boat you build. Some plywood boats built in a stitch and glue manner are only covered with glass cloth on the outside. That cuts the cloth cost in half. One model only covers the seams with glass cloth. That rally cuts costs.

If you do a bit a shopping you'll find that epoxy runs about $30 to $65 a gallon depending on brand and supplier. Typically you'll use one or 2 gallons. Buy 1. If you need more you'l find out toward the end of the project and hopefully you'll have saved a few bucks to buy it then, or found other project sto use it for, or you can buy just a quart if you jsut need a small quantity.

Glass cloth goes from $2 to $8 a yard, depending on width and thickness of the cloth (measured in the weight of a square yard). Wider cloth might be a deal if you can cut it so that you use less length.

Tools to go with this are mostly disposables. Budget $30 for stuff you'll use once and then trash.

If you plan to make the boat for extra heavy use, you'll use more glass and resin.

If you are building a stripper you can compensate for some of the cost through cutting our own strips.

If you are looking to build a less expensive boat you might consider using polyester resin instead of epoxy. About the least expensive boat you can build is made from lauan plywood, polyester resin, and glass cloth strips cut from a square of cloth. Quite a few stitch and glue designs can be built from these materials, but not all.

And of course the lesat expensive method is skin on frame. For the price of the resin and glasscloth of a wood kayak (andr maybe a bit less than that) you can build an entire Walrus from George Putz's book. Building a Walrus frame and planking it with lauan, as Mike Hanks did, would run about $250 or less. You would seal the wood with two coats of resin, but glass cloth would be optional.

Hope this helps.

PGJ