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.