Quick Update

The launch date for the kayak is scheduled for 22nd January, this Thursday afternoon.

My parents arrive for a month long visit from the UK, and I'll launch in the afternoon after I've picked them up from the airport.

The kayak is mostly painted, just some black pinstripes and a couple of areas to be touched up.  The seat is painted, the paddle is varnished and I've made and painted a toggle for the bow line.  Final touches will be some foam rubber mat cable tied to the seat and the forward deck beam (to protect my shins).

I still have top make a trolley to take it the 200m or so to the local boat ramp and beach.  I'll probably end up carrying it because I also have to paint and fit foot grips to some bolt-on sidesteps a friend fabricated for the Land Rover a couple of years ago.

Its going to be tight, but a Thursday launch it is.  

A Momentus Occasion

No not the launch, not quite.

I finally got some paint on the hull.  The sanding of the first load of exterior bog was completed last week, and the second fill on the underside was hard enough to sand at the weekend.  I made a start, but was otherwise engaged and so am now a little more behind.

Sunday was spent fixing a couple of things on the Land Rover to get it through the 6-monthly Warrant of Fitness certification that is required in New Zealand.  The relatively straight forward job of changing the power steering belt became an epic due to seized bolts.  The other job I knew had pitfalls associated with it.  I learnt so much in the process of completing the drop arm ball joint fix that I posted my findings here in the hope of my experience being useful to others tackling the same task. 

Anyway, last night I finished sanding the second fill and then I started preparing to paint.  I washed the bottom down with a warm solution of liquid sugar soap to degrease, remove the dust and any amine blush (a waxy emission from cured epoxy), then rinsed with plenty of water and allowed the boat to dry.

I then applied a coat of Taubmans UnderProof Acrylic Primer Undercoat.  This is a water-based acrylic with what smells like an amount of latex added to prevent bleeding through to the top coat.  I'm going to be using Taubmans Living Proof Indoor/Outdoor Acrylic Enamel Gloss as the top coat.  The reasons to use house paint rather than marine enamel like I tried for the cockpit interior are twofold.  Firstly, the marine enamel requires 24 hours between coats, whereas the acrylic enamel requires only an hour or two.  Secondly, the smell of the marine enamel was awful, even with the garage door closed it could be detected on walking passed while the boat dried inside.

Obviously there is a Christmas break coming, and we are off on a family camping trip until after New Year's, so the launch will definitely be in 2009.  I'm also pretty certain it will be in January of that year.

And finally, some boat building

I got home on Monday evening and was determined to spend a few hours in the garage on the kayak. It was raining quite a lot, so that ruled out digging clay, but I had to wrap things up early to go to the Land Rover Club meeting.

There was just enough time to sand the outer joints and fill the gaps and any remaining stitch/screw holes with a micro fibre mix of epoxy. I'm getting more confident with the stuff and made a good thick mix which went almost entirely where I wanted it to, and hardly at all where I didn't.

I also had a good go at the twisted keel line at the stern with the block plane and got rid of most of the twist. After I've taped the seem I'll add a little more filler to one side than the other and no one will ever know...

A Weekend in the Garden

We decided that it was time to do a bit of work on the garden. The new border that we created for the olive trees still wasn't finished, and we wanted to tidy the place up a bit before summer really gets going.

So on Saturday we went and loaded up the Land Rover with 180 litres of bark chippings and some more plants to finish thing off. I let Bridgit (a qualified seamstress) lay out the weed matting while I followed behind tucking it in to the edging strip. Once the last few plants were in and the bark was on, the whole lot looked much improved. So that's the view in one direction from the living room sorted.

In the other direction, we look out on to a huge trampoline that was gifted t me by a colleague. Sam loves it, and I have a quick bounce every now and again too. But its killing the grass and taking up too much space. We discussed the possibilities and decided that it would be great to move it over to a corner where an old rough concrete patio exits. Fine, apart from a spoil heap from a deck I built over a year ago currently fills the space.

I spent Sunday dismantling the very wonky pergola over the patio and recycling the wood into some temporary retaining. I then shovelled about 3 tonnes of soil and heavy clay from one side of the L-shaped concrete area to the other. I finished at about 7PM, totally exhausted but still with another tonne to move before the trampoline can be moved. And the weather doesn't look too clever for the next week, so it'll have to wait while I hide in the garage and get on with the kayak.

Photos to follow.

Stringers

On Saturday I lost a significant chunk of the morning while waiting in line for a haircut with my son at the Birkenhead Corner Barbers. Once shorn, we took the Land Rover down to the Birkdale Timber World to pick up the softwood for the stringers and running strips. I didn't want to waste more of the day going further afield, and my friend Simon works there, a fellow Land Rover nut.

After talking Land Rovers for about 15 minutes, I selected some fairly cheap 18mm square finger jointed softwood. Its not great stuff, but since the designer had e-mailed me back with some details about its purpose in the boat, I decided that it was more than up to the job. Basically, as in any true stitch and tape boat design, the plywood monocoque provided the boat with all its strength, and the stringers are there primarily to provide a gluing surface where a more usual epoxy fillet and glass tape join can't be made, i.e. in fitting the deck to the kayak, where no internal access is possible.

The rest of the day was spent tweaking the kayak hull and fitting the stringers along the top edge with screws, ready to be epoxied on later. I also spent a while planing the bottom inner corner of the stringers. This will remove a little bit of weight, since the timber I'm using is slightly over sized from the original specification.

While sanding one of these pieces, I had a bit of a mishap. My ring finger got caught in one of the accessory holes in the top of my portable workbench. It's ripped a lump of finger-tip away, I managed to stick it back down with a plaster and stem the blood, but it was very sore. I was using sharp tools all day, planes, saws, chisels and the jigsaw, and I managed to wound myself on a blunt work bench!

Saturday Morning - Tidying

Before any more work could be done on the kayak, I needed to tidy the garage. Apparently, the key to working with epoxy is being organised and tidy. I wanted a store to keep the epoxy containers with their pumps mounted that I could use and pack away with the minimum of fuss and the minimum of risk of getting resin all over things it shouldn't.



To this end I cleared a space in the corner of the garage near the door. For my epoxy storage unit, I used an old heavy duty plastic document container that I had previously made a lid for to use as a tool and recovery gear box in the back of the Land Rover. I chocked it up on blocks and screwed through its base into the block wall to keep it stood on its side. I used a piece of scrap board as a false floor, packed up at the front to bring the tapered box side back to near-enough level, and used a bit of redundant flat-pack computer desk to make a shelf over the top. The bungee cord closing was the same as had been used in the Land Rover, but I moved the cleat to on top of the shelf for easier access.



The beauty of this arrangement is that I just have to pull the containers onto the open lid/door to use them, and any spills should be restricted to this easily replaced piece of board. Perhaps I should cover it with some polythene sheet that can be pulled of and thrown away, allowing the door to be closed with no fear of it being bonded shut when I return the next day.

Before I stopped for lunch I went and got some safety equipment. For using the epoxy I wanted vinyl gloves (I find the latex ones far too flimsy), some good glasses that wouldn't keep slipping, a cover-all disposable suit and some masks that would be up to blocking the fine sanding dust. I went to the the Archer's Road branch of Protector Safety, where a very nice man soon had me fully outfitted for a mere $55.

Day 1 of the Kayak Build

So today (well yesterday by now) it was pleasantly sunny when I woke up, so time to get on with the build.

I prepared the deck outside the living room with the main tools for the day's activities, marking out and cutting the lower hull panels.

I also took over the dining room with the plans, and took a copy of the offsets so I could have them outside without fear of the master plans blowing away or getting damaged.

The first job was to mark station lines at 305mm intervals along the plywood sheets before measuring the widths for each panel edge as per the offset table. I soon realised that the pine moulding I was intending to rule these lines with was far from straight.

Plan B was to take an old flat pack wardrobe door and cut a set square, roughly 400mm by 1300mm, thus saving a good few dollars at the big shed DIY store. It save a bit of time as well, I want to plan my buying with the tasks ahead in mind and not spend half the build time going back and forth to Mitre10 or some other supplier of hardware.

So, back to the main task. I got 1 version of the four main parts measured out and then I faired the edges to get smooth, curved lines. For this I used a 3m length of PVC electrical trunking cover, pierced with a bradawl and then pinned to the ply. I also pinned both boards to the deck, aligned down one edge with a taught string, and faired over the panels.

Cutting out the parts was going to be a problem. I only have one workbench and the 4mm ply is very floppy. I decided to nip out and buy 4 fence posts, 100mm square and 2.4m long. They'll be used in a later landscaping project so its not money wasted, and they're the ideal height to keep the jigsaw blade off the deck.

Each piece (bottom panel fore and aft sections and side panel fore and aft sections) was used as a template to draw and cut a duplicate. The matching pair of parts were then clamped together and put in the workbench. I used a block plane to trim the edges and get the two pieces as similar to each other as possible. The planing process also fairs out any kinks in the edges introduced by less than skillful handling of the jigsaw.

That was enough for day one of the build. I'll do nothing tomorrow because of the Land Rover Owners Club Auckland meeting, but on Tuesday I hope to 'get out' (proper boat-building term that) the transom, bulkheads and deck beams.

Dart14

The plans I decided upon were the Dart14 single seat and Dart16 two seat kayaks from Selway Fisher.

These are relatively simple designs, although the 14' version looks somewhat more basic in its construction than the 16' variant, so it is the singlekayak that I shall make first.

I ordered the plans online and the arrived a week later. I read over them a few times and then got on with a few jobs around the house to clear the way for the kayak project. I also rang around for a few quotes. I'll post links to the suppliers as I actually purchase materials.

First off is the plywood, which I bought yesterday. I went to the PlyMan in Albany. It seemed an obvious choice because the stock is good, they comes recommended by John Welsford, the designer of the Rogue, my ultimate boat building goal, and they advertise on the radio, so I'd already heard of them.

I bought 6 sheets of 1220x2440x4mm Meranti Marine Bond B/BB ply, and 1 shhet of 1220x2440x9mm. Its beautiful looking stuff and a shame I will have to paint it, but I don't think my first-timer skills will be up to producing a bright finished work of art. Besides, I've already decided that orange will look best to compliment the Land Rover's shade of green and also look suitably safe and nautical.

Talking of the Land Rover, here it is, complete with roof bars after picking up the ply. I had to unload in a hurry because it was starting to rain.



















There's enough space to store the ply in the garage, but I think most of the build will have to take place outside. Roll on spring.

AnalogKid? Eh?

Its my user name for the Land Rover UK forums, I've been a member on there for quite a while and picked up lots of useful advice. I just thought I'd stick with the one online identity, any more would just get too confusing for me.



The name comes from a song by my favourite band, Rush. I've been a fan since the age of 11. The song was on the 1982 album Signals and follows the dreams and aspirations of an adolescent. The end theme of 'When I leave I don't know what I'm hoping to find, When I leave I don't know what I'm leaving behind' fit well with my recent history. In late 2004 I left the UK with my family to see how things would be in New Zealand.