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.