Small Progress

We've been busy lately, unfortunately just not with kayak building. I have however managed to scrape together some meager accomplishments from the last month:

Kayak #2 Stitched
We've managed to stitch the second boat, which now sits waiting to be faired and glued. It's been tough to go back and repeat the work that we just did on kayak #1 with said kayak sitting nearby looking almost done. But we managed to pull ourselves away to catch up on kayak #2.

Almost Deckbeams
We've also managed to put together the frame on which we'll be bending the deck beams. It doesn't look like much in the picture but it took a while to put together. Mostly because I was drilling the 2-inch holes for the clamps with a cordless drill. I had to stop and charge a few times.

Kayak #1 Just Sitting there looking nice...

Kayak #2 Freshly stitched and being faired...
The Deckbeam form...

Catch-up

Rich did some catching up of the second kayak this past weekend, getting it about halfway wired up and fixing a mistake we made earlier when hurriedly gluing on the sheer clamps. He also trimmed all the wire ends off of the outside of the first kayak, giving it a sleek kayak-y look and leading us to believe that that one at least would (probably) float if we were to be silly enough to put it in the water. Now it's ready for sanding the outside before we coat it with fiberglass and epoxy and move on to the top part (deck beam and deck and hatches and seat and finishing and other stuff). The first kayak is remarkably light even with all the epoxy we slathered onto it... here's hoping that bodes well for the finished product weight!


Both kayaks in perspective. The more-finished one is in the foreground. The one in the background has only been half stitched (as evidenced by the aft all askew).
Close-up of the wire stitching. Working with copper wire has been a major part of the project so far.
The relatively smooth and sleek glued kayak.
Again the glued kayak (and the laundry, which also was in process).

Glueing the First Kayak

This week we made some significant progress on one of the kayaks. We took the kayak that we had wired together last post and flipped it over onto the scaffold that you see below.

With the scaffold clamped to the sheers we placed levels across the kayak, approximately at the location of the bulkheads. Then we adjusted the kayak within the scaffold until the levels and our eyes told us it was level and even.

Getting the kayak straight at both ends took some doing. From above it wasn't at all obvious where the kayak was out of true. This meant spending a lot of time lying on our backs underneath the kayak then crawling back up again and tweaking, then crawling down again for another look.

Getting the stern to come together properly was problematic. There was about a quarter inch gap between the sides and bottom at the stern. The copper wires weren't strong enough to pull them together on their own. The solution was to tie a tourniquet around the back of the kayak to pull everything together while it was stitched.

Then in a whirlwind session of mixing and applying epoxy, fiberglass and filler, we glued the interior of the vessel. We had neglected to buy the large sheets of fiberglass yet, so we were unable to finish the cockpit area. But we did manage to glue and tape all of the other seams, and insert the bulkheads.


Next time we need to catch up with the other kayak (seen below in its current state)...

Hey look, it's a kayak!

This weekend was an exciting stint of kayak-building as we ended up with something with three dimensions instead of two! Last time we had got one boat's worth of pieces ready for stitching and we began the weekend by catching the other boat up (gluing sheer clamps to the side panels and finishing cutting and drilling the bottom panels). Since this marked the end of sawing for a while we also took the opportunity to do a thorough "shop cleaning" and remove the accumulated sawdust and scraps crowding the floor.

Next we were ready to begin the stitching of the stitch and glue technique. We cut a lot of 18 gauge copper wire into lengths of about 3-4 inches and began by stitching together the ends of one set of side panels and placing them upside down on a pair of sawhorses. We installed a spreader at the middle of the kayak to give it the final width (about 2 feet) and then we took one pair of bottom panels and stitched together the keel seam by passing a piece of wire through each hole and twisting it around itself on the other side, thus holding the panels together. Even though we were warned by the instruction book not to make it too tight, the first set were indeed too tight to open up. As we were excited by the process we just swapped in the other set of bottom panels, loosened up a little and repeated the process, and we were able to open the bottom panels up forming an obtuse tent on top of the side panels (supported by some cross beams). It really looked pretty kayak-like at this point!

Next we needed to stitch the bottom of the side panels to the top of the bottom panels. We started at the bow, each taking one side and carefully drilling a few holes at a time and stitching the panels together smoothly and evenly. While feeding and twisting the wires got tiresome, it was exciting to see the boat take shape, and by the end of the afternoon we had one fully stitched kayak. Next we'll be making sure that it's true and straight and preparing for bulkheads and fiberglass fillets.

Almost starring to look kayak-like

This week we finally managed to glue the sheer clamps to one of the kayaks. It took us a little bit longer than we expected to get to this point.

Firstly it was a bit awkward to cut out the 17ft long panels. We didn't have a bench long enough to hold something that long, so we had to drape the panels over two benches and a table saw. Their heights were similar but not really all that close, further complicating things. Even with everything clamped down one of us needed to hold the panels still while the other cut. Despite out precautions we still went though a few blades though this process. At one point we had run out of blades and had to finish cutting the panel using a hand saw (see below).

After the fiasco with the sheer clamps last time we had to do a bit of cleanup/catchup work to get them into shape to be glued. It seems the epoxy mix was a bit thin and ran out of some of the joints, and needed to be re-glued.

This leaves us with one kayak's worth of panels ready to start stitching and the second kayak's set of materials is ready for the sheer-clamp-gluing process that we did this week. In fact we might have been able to glue both this week but for the lack of both time and clamps. I think we're going to need to get a few more clamps if we plan on continuing work on both kayaks in parallel.

The sheer clamps and the fair curve

This weekend we continued where we left off last time with the side and bottom panels. With the stations and offsets drawn we used a batten to draw a fair curve over the points.
The batten was a bit tricky to obtain. We needed something long and uniformly flexible, so no knots or scarfs. I found what must have been the longest piece of lumber that Home Depot carries (none of their measurement tools exceed 17ft). It was in a bin along with other pieces of trim and edging. I think its dimensions were roughly 1'' x 1/2''. As you can probably imagine, getting it home was an adventure in itself. The batten was quite a bit longer than my car, but being flexible readily conformed to the shape of my car. It looked a bit like a large flattened "n" stretching from bumper to bumper. Unfortunately I was so focused on getting it home safely that no pictures were taken.

With small nails driven at the offsets at each station we applied the batten and drew a fair curve. On each of the bottom panels there was a single offset which didn't fit to a fair curve. Since it was on both of the bottom panels we felt confident in omitting it from the curve.

Then Christine set to tracing the shapes of the stem and stern of the kayaks from the plans onto the panels. I had planned to use carbon paper to trace the shape from the plans onto the panels, as I had done in a previous construction. After some consideration we opted to follow the method which was suggested in the manual of driving small nails through the lines of the plans into the wood below.

While Christine was addressing the stem and stern, I was preparing the material that will form the sheer clamps. The plan was to use a few 8ft x 3/4" x 6" boards which could be ripped down to 8ftx3/4"x1" strips and then scarfed to suitable length. Having been emboldened by our previous scarfing work I thought this would be a snap. With said hubris I started out on scarfing the sheer clamps. Somehow on my initial try I managed to make 12 sections, none of which came even close to fitting together. Fortunately there was enough extra that material I was able to trim off the first attempt and try again. This time things went much more smoothly and the glue is setting on the scarfed sheer clamps as I write this.


Next time we should be ready to cut the panels out and glue them to the sheer clamps. CLC suggests using a table saw to cut out the panels, but this seems a bit risky to me given the curves involved. We will probably use the slower but safer reciprocating saw for the job.

Stations, please!

This past weekend we took our nicely scarfed blanks (two side panels and two bottom panels for each boat) and marked the contours of the actual shapes we'll be cutting from them. This is done by measuring at foot long intervals (stations) down the length of the blank and reading from the plans to see at each station how far up the lower contour of the panel will be and how far up the upper contour will be. I don't have a super picture to clear up that confusing description... but it may become clear as we get a little farther along. Next we'll basically play connect the dots to make a fair line that follows all of these points along each contour and we'll cut out the pieces to stitch into a boat! This weekend's work was exciting in that it started to look more like boats that we're building, rather than just really long strips of wood.

Vacation

Not kayak related, but here by popular demand are the vacation pictures:

Pelicans were all but omnipresent.

Weekend #3

We haven't done much on the kayaks of late, what with the Maine Boatbuilders' Show the week before last and then our vacation this last week. (For those interested we had a great time in Cayo Costa).

However with what scant time we did have we managed to pull together some time to glue the scarfs. There aren't many pictures for this post because we were both so busy preparing and applying the epoxy, and well, there's just not that much to see at this point in the process.

We laid the panels out along a seam in the basement floor (which we checked with the laser level for straightness), applied thickened epoxy, then weighted them with the only sufficient weights which were available; a vintage sewing machine and a lead-acid battery. We glued the panels in two batches, side-panels before we left for vacation and bottom panels after we returned. Since the basement is a little cold this time of year this let us give the epoxy a reasonable amount of time to cure between glueings.

When we removed the weights from the first batch, we noticed that the end of the scarf
is raised a bit in relation to the rest of the panel. The side panels were the first we glued and we were still working out our process at this point (and planning a vacation). The bottom panels are still curing, but I think that we managed to avoid the bump when gluing these. This might make the scarf joint slightly more visible on the sides of the kayaks, but I don't think it will be all that much more noticeable than the scarf would be already.

Weekend #2

This weekend we finished all the scarfing and have the planks ready to be epoxied together - with much sawdust and plane-curls produced along the way. I hadn't been convinced that the scarfing process would work as easily as the instructions seemed to indicate, but it really is a slick system. We stacked four planks on top of each other, staggering them by 1.25" and then used a block plane to create an even bevel across all four pieces. The strata of the plywood provided a nice affirmation when we'd done it evenly, as planing at a consistent angle reveals regular patterns in the plywood levels (as shown in this picture of Rich's lovely scarf).


After finishing the (copious) scarfing, we realized that we'd make a slight mistake in that we'd made two of the scarf angles upside down by accident. We'd been figuring all along that it didn't matter which side ended up as up or down as we did this since we're just making the planks out of which to cut the actual pieces, but on these particular two planks it DID matter since we'd cut extra pieces out of each of the planks being joined together and they had to be scarfed together a certain way. I'm not sure how to explain it in words, but enough said that we realized that we needed to cut off the backward scarfs and rescarf in the opposite direction. Our first problem-solving experience of the adventure, and a fairly simple solution as a result!

Once we'd resolved that, the planks were ready to be epoxied at the scarfed edges. We thought we might try to squeeze in the epoxying job Sunday afternoon before I headed home on the train, but it turned out that we needed more epoxy before we could proceed, which meant more studying for me (a good thing). At this coming weekend's Maine BoatBuilders Show we'll get any other supplies we need and head back to the basement!

Beginning

For the past few months we've been planning to build two Chesapeake Light Craft kayaks (One each, neither one of us is that decadent). We elected to go the build from scratch route rather than order the whole kit.

This weekend we took delivery of the wood (much thanks to Peter and Judy) and began work in earnest.

We set up shop in my basement. This required a bit of cleaning before we could get started, but should ultimately provide a better environment in which to work.

The basement was about 55 degrees (F), so with the thought that we would be curing epoxy soon I brought a small electric heater down there. Very small. After 4 hours there had been no appreciable change in temperature. Luckily we weren't far enough along yet that there was any need to cure epoxy. I've attached a photo of the heater which failed to heat the basement, since although it fell quite short of the goal it seems to have really given its best shot.


Starting from four plywood sheets, we cut out the blanks that we would need to assemble the bottom and sides of the kayaks. Below Christine measures to cut one of the blanks.
The next step was to scarf the pieces together to form the 17ft strips that would form the sides and bottoms respectively. Before we dove into this task we decides to do some practice scarfing with the scrap that was left over from cutting out the blanks. I think that this side excursion will let us be a bit more confident when we actually set down to scarf the actual side and bottom parts.

The side and bottom blanks waiting to be scarfed.