Inside Taping

Saturday morning I rushed out to finish taping the inside joints in the hull. I had a little over half the length of the boat to do, for three seams, the centreline and the two chine seams. I also had to tape in the transom. I had to rush because at mid day we were going off to watch a rugby match. I was just soaking the last bit of tape when Sam's friend came round to come with us to the game.

We went to North Harbour Stadium in Albany where we met up with neighbours who had also 'borrowed' an extra child to watch the match. We went to see our local side, North Harbour, play Auckland in the Battle of the Bridge, the local derby in the NPC competition. Unfortunately North Harbour were beaten 22-29. On a positive side though, all the kids got an autograph and a chat from All Black Joe Rokocoko.

When we got back the weather had closed in and we spent the rest of the day indoors. Sunday was a different story though. Over night it had officially become spring with the introduction of daylight saving time, and outside it was bright and warm.

The first job I tacked was to glue on the inwales. I mixed some epoxy with plenty of micro fibres for extra strength and to fill any gaps. Once the hull was spread with a line of epoxy along the top edge, I screwed the inwales on using the holes I made when dry fitting, and added a few extra to pull everything in line where there were gaps.

With all the seams on the kayak taped up, I adjusted the corners on the bulkheads to account for the epoxy fillets under the tape and dry fitted all the athwartship pieces again. After a little fiddling I had all of them fitting quite snugly apart from the forward deck beam, which wasn't as wide as the boat any more. This I made right by pulling the boat together by a webbing strap attached to temporary screws in the top of the inwales.

Again, a micro fibre rich mix of epoxy was made up to glue the deck beams and bulkheads in place, making especially sure that there were no gaps left around the bulkheads. These will seal off an air-tight compartment at each end of the kayak, which provide flotation in the event of the boat getting swamped. Some of the pieces were wedged firm in the hull, others I added a couple of screws or tacks to keep firm while I added fillets of epoxy with low density micro balloons added before adding glass tape and neat epoxy to strengthen the joins.

Finally, I added pins to the centre of all the members, and to the point of the bow and the centre of the transom and ran a line to check everything was straight. There's a good line running right down the boat, with only the forward bulkhead out of line by maybe 3mm. Hopefully this will be reduced when the webbing strap comes off, and failing that, I should be able to pull it straight when fitting the deck.

A Busy Week

Sam's school production, Roald Dahl's Goldilocks and the Three Bears (it's a court case attempting to bring Goldilocks to justice for rampaging through the bears' house) was on this week. It left very little time in the evenings what with practising lines and ferrying Sam to the theatre at the local college. And of course on Thursday we had to go and see the show for ourselves. Then on Friday I had the annual work's dinner so was only home long enough to wash and change.

So no work on the kayak all week. I did make up some flat pack storage cubes to try and help Sam tidy the inside of his play house (seen in the background of the strawberry planting scene in the previous post). I also made up a desktop out of pine boards to go across top of two of the storage units. Oh well, the clocks change at the weekend, so perhaps next week will be more productive.

A Busy Weekend

Bridgit went away with work friends on a fishing weekend to the Bay of Islands, so I was on full-time child minding duties. Work on the kayak was restricted to a few minutes here and there tidying up the runs and lumps in the resin from when I taped the forward end of the boat. At least its ready for the aft end to be taped, and I'll try had to make a neater job of it. Advice I've read, and now have experience to trust and emphatically repeat is 'epoxy is a nightmare to sand, keep it neat and tidy in the first place, its way easier than cleaning up afterwards.'

The previous weekend we bought half-a-dozen strawberry plants for Sam to look after. On Saturday we went out to buy some timber to make a planter, some compost to plant them up into, and some straw to mulch them with. We got everything but the straw. I bought 150x19mm fence palings 1.2m long and some 40x60mm wooden pegs, 600mm long. I kept the design simple and got Sam involved marking and drilling the clearance holes for the nails, a bit of nailing (but he's a lousy aim) an generally letting him know what was being done at each stage and why. He got busy with friends in the afternoon so we didn't get the strawberries planted until Sunday evening when the sun was off them.

On Sunday morning we went over to Takapuna so Sam could pick up a library book he'd reserved. We took a mooch around the market while we were there, and I found a gem on a second-hand tool store. I got a curved sole spoke shave for $20, in good rust free condition. They are $87 new, and I was reluctant to spend that much on a tool that won't see huge amounts of use. I cleaned and sharpened it and gave it a try. All seems well and it should be good for shaping the cockpit hole one I get the deck on in about a week's time.

Steady Progress

I got a couple of hours on the kayak yesterday. I laid fillets of epoxy thickened with micro balloons laid down the joints. These fillets are not so much structural as to provide a gentle transition from one panel to another. I did all three seems on the forward half of the boat.

Once the fillets were in place, I laid lengths of the glass tape on the still uncured fillets and then wetted the tape out with straight epoxy.

I'm finding the epoxy part of the process quite a challenge, and although I'm learning lots, I'm afraid that the kayak won't be too pretty when I'm done. I'm gaining confidence in mixing the filleting or jointing additives thick enough not to run and slump, but getting the tape to sit nice and flat is also a problem. I'll not worry too much about the seams that will be hidden in the fore and aft air tight chambers, but I suspect I have a lot of difficult epoxy sanding and smoothing to do to the mid section that will be seen through the cockpit opening. I hope I can make a neater job of the outer seams.

A Few Photos

I went out to do a bit of preparation last night, and was already to lay some epoxy fillets and glass tape over the hull seams. I went in for dinner and by the time I was done the night had chilled off too much for the epoxy to safely cure. In the meantime, here are a few pictures of the details covered over the weekend.


The above shot shows the difference in the profiles of rear bulkheads MK2 and MK3. The latest (the one that fits) is on top, and shows a much steeper vee to the bottom panels than the one taken from the plans.


This is a closeup of the scarf joint in the inwale, nailed to a a board but with a layer of builders polythene between the inwale and anything else wooden. This is so that I stood half a chance of separating the items after the epoxy over run had cured. Even so, pulling that nail out of the joint took some effort.


Finally a view of the epoxy tabs that allow removal of the cable ties before laying the fillets and tape. I've prepped up the forward half of the boat and its still in one piece after removing about 3 dozen cable ties.

Rear Bulkhead Version 3.0

Sunday morning was taken up with a trip to the library and Kings Plant Barn. I returned my copies of John Welsford's Backyard Boatbuilder and John Gardner's Dory Book and got some books on sea kayaking to make sure I 'll be prepared by the time launch date arrives. Since my partner, Bridgit, has suddenly decided to go all Earth Mother on us, we were at the garden centre to buy some olive trees and tomato plants, and Sam got some strawberry plants which no doubt he'll fail to look after.

When I finally got around to looking at the kayak, I decided it was time to address the rear bulkhead, the second version of which I failed to make fit while i was tweaking the lines of the hull on Saturday. It seems that as drawn, the transition between the steep vee of the transom and the relatively slack vee of the bulkhead less than 3 feet further forward is just too much for the 4mm plywood to take. In attempting to make the piece fit I was forcing the seams of the boat apart.

The solution, I decided after much pondering, was to make my own bulkhead according to the shape of my hull. I used the top profile of the existing part and carefully measured the width across the inwales, the width at the chines and the depth from a line between the chines and the centreline of the boat. These details were transferred onto a piece of cardboard, and when that fitted snugly, the shape was transferred onto 9mm ply and cut and planed to shape.

To finish for the day I took of the inwales and laid them out on a plastic covered board to scarf joint them with epoxy. I nailed the epoxy joint tight while it cured, and then used up the rest of the mix putting little dabs on all the hull panel joins, so that when I come to fillet and tape the seams I can take out all the cable ties first. The first mix was a bit too thin and worked OK on the centreline but it tended to run down from the chine joints. A second batch was made much thicker with extra microfibres and it all looked good when I closed the garage door on it for the night.

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!