Category: Revelation

Kayak Construction, first glue, first problems

The temperature is finally over 65 degrees, so it’s time to start gluing. And it did not go well.

As per the instructions, I mixed up an ounce of epoxy. I painted some on the boards around the seams. Then I cut some of the fibreglas tape and put them down on the wet epoxy and painted some more to wet the tape. Problems:

  • As I painted the epoxy on the tape, the tape kept moving around. I ended up having to hold down the tape with my fingers (in the rubber gloves, of course).
  • As I was painting, one of the boards popped up a bit as a nail came lose. This made gaps and bubbles to painstakingly paint out.
  • Bits of fibreglas frayed off the edges and ends of the tape, and had to be carefully picked out of the epoxy.
  • other random dirt got into the epoxy and had to be picked out.
  • I ran out of epoxy in the middle of it and had to run inside and mix up another ounce.

With that all done, the second part was to cut some strips of mylar and put them on top of the tape, then squeegee it flat, and put weights on them. Problems:

  • I’d put the nails in the boards too close to the seams, so I had to remove them and move them back so the mylar would fit. Several times that lifted one of the boards, ruining all my previous work.
  • The instructions had said to weight them down with bricks. I didn’t think I had any bricks, but I figured all the scrap 2x4s I had could be piled on top. Unfortunately, it turned out that the 2x4s weren’t heavy enough, and things were popping up. With the glue hardening quickly, I had to improvise. I found a pile of half-bricks in a dingy corner of the garage and pressed them into service. Unfortunately they were filthy, and got dirt all over everything. I’m hoping none of it got below the mylar sheets.

    • I’m not looking forward to tomorrow’s reveal to see just how ugly these joints look. Hopefully it will be like my canoe, where I know where every blemish is but everybody else just sees the overall beauty of it.

Kayak Construction, Shopping List part 1

I’ve given up trying to decide if a day of doing nearly nothing counts as a day or not, so subsequent posts on this project probably aren’t going to have day numbers any more.

Today I made a first whack at getting the stuff on the shopping list. I didn’t get all I need, mostly because I couldn’t find a bunch of stuff at Home Despot and didn’t reach our local hardware store until just before closing.

After that, I started laying out the boards to do the end butting, but I can’t actually do the gluing until I get a few more items on the shopping list. I also discovered that I don’t have enough space on the table to do both sides at once. That means wasting some epoxy, but on the other hand it means taking it slower and that’s probably a good thing for me.

I’m currently doing the two hour hot water soak that they recommend for your epoxy to undo any crystallization that might have happened in transit.

And I’ve got a roll of wire to cut into 3.5 inch lengths, so I’ve got the roll of wire, a pair of “dikes” (diagonal cutters), and a juice glass which just happens to be 3.5 inches deep, and I’m cutting like a mad man.

Wet one

I went kayaking for the first time in 3 weeks today. The weather wasn’t looking great, but I figured it had been too long. I was right about the weather – it started raining when I was about 2/3rds of the way to the weir, but it wasn’t a cold rain so I kept going. I was alone, so I was paddling as fast as I could. Probably too fast. Mostly I wanted to see how far I could go without pausing, and then after I had to pause, how few pauses I could take and still keep up a decent pace. That’s sort of how I built up my fitness when I first started cross country skiing and again when I started mountain biking – go fast, and work on increasing the range, instead of doing the more conventional starting with long slow distance and building up the speed, which is how I started running.
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