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.