Category: Revelation

Kayak Construction: Starting the top deck

Oh, two posts in one day! After the epoxy had dried a bit I went to scrape off the excess and I realized it was actually dry enough that I could work with it if I were careful. So I started wiring the deck. And it went pretty well. It was great to see that the lessons I learned from the hull are making the deck work much better. I got the front panels (panel #4) wired together, the shear panels (panel #3) drilled and wired to the front panels, and started on the rear panels as well. Everything is wired very loosely so that I can make adjustments afterwards.

It looks great, and I can really start to see the beautiful lines of the kayak for the first time. It looks exactly as I hoped, a hard chined British-style.

And once again, I am reminded that no matter how tempting it is, you should not put the portable drill down on the battery pack as shown in every catalog picture you’ve ever seen. I’ve now knocked over the drill again and broken a third 1/16th inch drill bit. I’m trying very hard to put the drill down on its side, in the hopes that my last 1/16th inch drill bit will last until the end of this project.

Kayak Construction: Flipping the hull

Today I start on the deck. First task is to glue the back of the cockpit together. That took about 30 seconds. But since once that’s done, the next step is to start putting assembling the deck on the boat. So I took the time to remove the two seven inch high pieces that were screwed onto the temporary frames when I first turned the hull upside down to work on the outside.
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DSLR 2: The cheap way out?

Hey, I’ve got a Minolta Maxxum 7000 film camera which my Dad gave me when he bought a brand new Minolta 7D, and it’s a pretty nice. And I’ve got three lenses for it, one good Minolta one and a couple of cheap-ass Sigma Tek ones I bought on eBay. Now that Minolta is no more, Minolta 7Ds are pretty cheap on eBay. Do you think a used Minolta 7D would be a good option? I have no doubt the Minolta lens would work with it, but I wonder if the Sigma Tek telephoto will auto focus?

DSLR?

I can’t find my Nikon Coolpix 8800. I’ve looked all over the house and the garage for it, and I can only assume that the underwear gnomes took it.

So, assuming I was to buy a replacement, what should I get? Things I liked about the Coolpix 8800:

  • SLR form factor
  • 10x optical zoom, from 35mm equivalent 33 to 330mm
  • 8 megapixel

Things I hate, hate, hate about this camera:

  • Fake SLR – when you look through the eyepiece, you’re not looking through the glass, you’re looking at a tiny low resolution LCD.
  • When you depress the shutter half way, it will lock in the focus or the exposure but not both
  • It utterly failed horribly to focus up close. You’d frame the picture, make sure everything you wanted to be in focus was in focus, click the shutter, and then it would whirr as tried both extremes of the focus, and finally take the picture when absolutely nothing in frame was in focus.

So, is there any point at looking at anything other than the Digital Rebel XTi?

Meta: New blog category

I added a new category to the blog, “Kayak Construction” and moved all my construction project postings to that category. Mostly that’s for my own benefit, so I can find them again if I need to. But like all WordPress blogs, each category has it’s own RSS feed so if you want, you can just subscribe to those posts if you really want to. (The only time I used that separate feed capability is when LUGOR set up a “Planet” feed of LUGOR members blogs, and I just gave them the URL for the feed for the “Geekery” category.)