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.