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Returning to the Kayak Build
It was blowing pretty good when I got to the Boathouse - it would have been a great day to go sailing.
I'd been gone for a coupe weeks and it was good to be back.
Mark, who lives in Newport, dropped by to see what was going on. As with most visitors, I put him to work. He's practicing shrinking the 8oz polyester cloth with a heat gun.
It always amazes me how well this stuff shrinks up. I love making skin-on-frame boats.
That is one beautiful boat. Mark's help was excellent.
I slapped a coat of ACE Spar Urethane on the kayak and Landon showed up and we got started on the next kayak. We had another visitor, another Mark, by the way. This Mark is the local Job Corps supervisor and has had his team doing work at the waterfront.
More visitors! The Boathouse was part of a Scavenger Hunt for an End of the Year party. The girls were off to the baseball diamond next.
We are building a total of three of these kayaks - the prototype and two more. The prototype was built as a stand alone process so we could learn, the next two are straight up production models and we'll do as much side-by-side building as possible.
Friday saw the frames and gunnels installed on the next two kayaks. Saturday started with making the bow of the third one (bow for the second was already completed.) We had some 1x10 cedar laying around, but a traditional boat would have used a carved tree trunk that had grown on a hillside.
The run out of the grain makes the cedar fragile at the nose, so we inserted a 1/8" dowel for reinforcement.
Geoff started putting another coat of urethane on the skin. We are going with three coats before water testing this time.
Time to lay the keel for boat #2. The big takeaway from the first boat was ergonomics. We'll be making the next two an inch deeper than the first.
We lashed the bow stem in place first, then set about getting the shape right for the hull.
Here's the stern stem - cut from a 1x10.
The stern stem gets a lot of lashing - requiring a lot of holes.
Stern stem lashed in place. Guess which knots I did and which ones Geoff did?
There it is, all lashed up. Next: The ribs.
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