July 30: Hoist the deck and man the coaming, me boys! Yaaarrrrgghhh

Mike glued and nailed the fore section of the deck to the shear clamps and clamped the deck to the carlins, while I (and some well-placed straps) held it all together. arrrrrrrrrggggghhh matey! Don't we sound like seadog-pirates with our boat-talk? shiver me timbers and blow me down.

Remember when Mike drilled holes in the hull for his footbraces? Well, here are the screwheads sticking out of the bilge panels! We filled the holes with thickened epoxy before setting the screws, however. Those holes made us both a bit nervous. 

This is my seat. I would really like to paint it in bright multi-colors (with epoxy paint, of course). !Nubb! 

The view from my (eventual) seat: my footbraces and the back of Mike's seat. The clamps won't be there on the deck, we hope.

July 17 through 29: We lose track of the days ......

Well, It's been an interesting couple of weeks since we last blogged. Sister Susan arrived for a visit which was waaaaay fun. She arrived at Midway on July 19^th and found our hot weather quite cool. In fact, she had to borrow jeans and a sweater and flannel pants to keep warm. At night she slept under the down comforter. I dunno, maybe we keep our air conditioner set too low? But the weather took a cool turn and we were able to turn off the A/C altogether and open the windows for a few days. It was really nice weather. We vegged out and watched movies, shopped, ate gourmet food, ate non-gourmet food, ate non-food, had dinner at Kim and Joel's, picked up Eric in Chicago and went to a Japanese garden in Rockford (see Kim and Joel's photos at http://www.technicallyevolved.com/galleries/thumbnails.php?album=17 ), barbequed (using the word as a verb, in the traditional Yankee way) in our back yard, went to the Art Institute and Millennium Park in Chicago, and generally had a great time. I hope Susan did, too, although we may have worn her out with all the long distance car and bus trips. We hated to see her go home. I also did not mention the fact that SHE HELPED us with our BOAT! After the epoxy arrived ... but let me go back to where we were when I last blogged ..... Our end pour resembled a Jackson Pollack painting, due to the melting of the modeling clay.

 

The day after we cooled the steaming ends of our poor pollacked boat off, I called the experts and found out that an end pour bears that name because, in actual practice, most kayak builders literally stand the boat up on its end to get the correct angle to epoxy the panels and shear clamps solidly together at the ends. This made complete sense to us, at last, and we started to plot a way to get our boat up on end. Our garage is not especially tall and since it existed in a previous life as an octagonal motorcycle club house, it has some very unique interior construction. We hoisted it up as far as we could into the rafters and completed the end pour in the bow.

 

Finally the bow looks like it will stick together in a crisis!

 

Alas, when we tried to reverse the boat we discovered that we could not get the proper angle on the aft end of boat. We puzzled for a while over what we could do to get the boat at the most acute angle possible.

 

Finally our combined brainpower arrived at the only solution: put the boat in a tree!!!!!

The three of us moved the boat out to the back yard and located a maple tree with a suitable crotch to hold the boat securely. Mike used a strap to ensure that it would not get knocked over by a rogue gust of wind or a curious passerby ...

 

and proceeded to pour the epoxy into the aft end of the boat.

 

After about 8 hours, we could see that we had finally succeeded!

 

Just because it made such a pretty picture, we had to take this shot

 

And for perspective ...

 

We carried to boat with its freshly hardened ends back into the garage where Mike proceeded to drill holes in the hull!!!!!

Actually, as crazy as it sounds, I had confirmed with the company that this drilling of holes in the hull was indeed necessary. Looking at the website again, we confirmed that photos of the boat we are building do show screwheads in the bilge panel just behind the fore bulkhead. It is the only way to secure the footbraces to the interior of the cabin. Still, I could not bear to watch as Mike performed the drilling. All I could think was YIKES!

For the following few days, we were unable to do any further work as we had used the last of the blasted epoxy! UPS finally delivered on Wednesday July 26^th, the same day Susan flew home to Georgia. But she played a major role in the building of our mighty boat and was witness to some of our most challenging moments.

I apologize for the lengthy absence from the Blog and I hope we did not discourage those among you who have faithfully followed our adventures. Tomorrow – we build our seats!!

~ posted by the Nubbed One

 

July 16: Epoxy Dam Revisited (or Epoxylypse Now Redux)

The thermometer read 80+ this morning before the sun came up. It was a hot HOT day in our little patch of paradise. We stopped by the hardware store on the way home from church and picked up a box of gloves. We reviewed the next steps in the manual and decided that we were ready to try the end pour again PLUS make the preparations to install the footbraces. After all, we had learned our lesson on Saturday and were prepared to follow directions carefully ... no more substitutions!

Yeah ...

In order to mark the placement of the footbrace rails, we had to carry our boat out to the grass in the backyard.

 

This attracted the attention of a couple of neighbors, naturally. We showed off our work proudly,  

trying to downplay the ugly mess in the foresection after our epoxy dam disaster.

 

We thought we had the epoxy dam in the bow and stern understood and were ready for another pour. We used clear packaging tape to cover the cardboard “dams” and used packaging and duck tape to seal the cardboard. We used modeling clay (nicely colored) to seal up any holes the tape missed.

Now you would have to figure that all that effort would lead to dams capable of holding in some epoxy.

 

As it turns out, going to church in the morning was not enough good karma to appease the epoxy demons. The bow pour started off pretty well. The first few cups of glue went in with no apparent leak. Given that promising sign, we began the stern pour. Almost immediately the stern dam developed a leak and we were well on our way to a repeat performance. We sopped up the glue like it was so much water on the floor with rags and such until the leakage began to slow. The varying colored modeling clay that we had used to seal the dam was now beginning to melt. This, a result of the heat generated by the epoxy, was transforming an ordinary stern into a Jackson Pollock painting.

A mask was donned to try to prevent further brain damage but it may be too late already. 

It became clear that the day’s bad news would continue as I looked to the bow to see smoke rising from the pour. In checking this it was clear that the bow dam had leaked as well and now we had each end leaking and smoking, I think just as a sort of anger enhancer. The bow pour had much more glue in it and the heat generating from this was beginning to worry me. I was afraid the heat would discolor the bow section or worse so the garden hose came out to save the day.

For the next hour or so I sprayed the hull with cold water making quite the mess in the already messy garage. As an added bonus I soaked a bag of charcoal that happened to be in the line of fire of the hose.

After this ordeal, there seemed little reason to extend the extra effort trying to figure out why the manual seemed to want us to drill holes in the hull to mount the foot braces. (The foot braces were the original day’s task as the end pours were not expected to take much time). The screws would only protrude at most 1/8 of an inch from the brace thus making it difficult to understand why this would be a good idea. Not only did the drilling make no apparent sense but the instructions seemed to give two different dimensions for the same holes (1/4 " AND 5/16". The screws are slightly under 1/4") . Seems the foot braces will have to wait.
~posted by Mike, the dyslexic left-handed carpenter

 

July 15: It started out great ... planing, planing...

When you get up at dawn and it is already 80 degrees and dripping with humidity outside, you KNOW it's gotta be one of those Illinois days that either go terribly right or terribly wrong. It started well enough - Mike had sharpened the planing blades to the point that you could get a cut just from looking at them too hard. Having never planed, I figured this would be a job that I would only watch rather than participate in. But to my surprise, I got to try it and I liked it a lot. Is there a job I could get where all I had to do all day is plane? It is an extremely satisfying way to occupy one's time, to be sure. The shear clamps had to be planed at a very particular angle (accomplished with a planing guide ) The fore end of the boat used a guide with a 24" radius and from the fore pair of hanging knees to the stern, a 30 inch radius guide was used. This makes for a rolling curve that is real pretty and a little challenging to achieve. But we did it, despite the extreme heat and humidity, and broke for lunch when it was done. Oh if only we had known what lay before us in the afternoon of this fateful day! 

The MasterPlaner and Plane-Blade-Sharpener himself.

July 15: The Epoxy Dam Be Damned Disaster

After the planing was completed, the manual says it is time to pour the optional epoxy dams in the bow and stern. These are reinforcing bodies of epoxy that help harden the ends and protect a boat from doom and destruction. We opted to include the epoxy dams in our boat. After all, how simple is it to construct a cardboard barrier in the very tip, seal it with tape, and fill the cavity thus formed with unthickened epoxy? We grew bold and giddy as I quickly rendered custom-fitting cardboard levees to hold the epoxy in place while it hardened. The choice to use duct tape (rather than the clear package tape we had used throught the project up to this point) seemed like a very logical move.
If this were a movie, the music would grow ominous while the camera zoomed in on the duct tape.
Everything was going fine. The clever dyslexic left-handed carpenter mixed up the epoxy and poured it carefully into the space we had created in the nose of our craft. The first batch only filled about a third of the cavity so he proceeded to mix up a second batch.
At that point, things began to unravel ... just as he discovered, mid-squirt, that there was no more resin in Jug #1 I discovered that the levee in the nose had failed and epoxy was spreading into the rest of the fore section of the boat. Meanwhile, he was trying to change out the empty jug of resin for the new jug and resin was going everywhere - on him, the floor, various tools, etc. He had to remove his gloves because they had also filled with resin and guess what! The box of ten thousand gloves we purchased at the start of the project had only one more glove in it! At the nose of the boat, I was madly cramming newspaper in, trying to shore up the failed levee and stop the flood of epoxy. It was an all-out disaster!
We finally managed to think clearly enough to tip the thing up on end so gravity could be our friend. We have removed the goo from ourselves and the tools and all but this was, all-in-all, a tough day at the boat shop. We are hoping that the damn epoxy dam hardens decently. If all else fails, we may want to use this thing as an icebreaker. 

So this is how we ended our day ... with the boat tipped up on its nose to prevent epoxy from filling the fore compartment. We trust gravity is on our side. Sad - isn't it? 

Devil Cat Squats on Kayak Manual!!

I'm not gonna try to move her -----> Look at those EYES!!!!