Gluing the deck beam

The boat has a single deck beam that's laminated from 5 pieces of 4mm plywood. They're 2" wide, but I'll cut the beam to about 1.5" when it's dry. The radius of the finished beam is 16", so the plans call for a 15" radius gluing mold to allow for a little bit of spring back. I started clamping in the middle and worked down to the ends. With 15 plies held together by epoxy, you could probably park a buick on this thing. By the way, I'm clamp-wealthy, despite being a cheap bastard. Also, I think some googly eyes would make this picture much better.

My tools are older than I am..

With the four main panels cut, I plowed into cutting the rest of the pieces - the forward and aft hatch covers, risers, doublers, and so forth. It seems like a lot of parts when you first see the plans, but there's really a surprisingly small number of parts and pieces. I think it speaks well of the CLC folks and their design - to paraphrase A. Einstein, this boat seems to be as simple as possible, but not more so.

Along with cutting panels, I also scarfed the sheer clamps together to make 16 feet lengths of 3/4" by 1 1/2" straight grain fir. The plans call for a conservative 8:1 scarf angle rather than the customary 12:1 because these pieces will be joined to the side panels, which in turn will be glassed, so an 8:1 joint will be plenty strong.  For 3/4" stock, 8:1 means a six inch hypotenuse. The Japanese pull saw is the ticket for cutting scarfs in this kind of stock. It's really easy to get accurate results if you go carefully. I marked the angle, dropped a perpendicular as a guide to make sure I was cutting square, and cut these four ramps by hand in about 15 minutes. A couple of minutes touch-up with the plane and they were ready to glue.

I followed the same gluing procedure as I did with the ply: put down some wax paper, align the sticks along the front edge of my benchtop to make sure they're straight, slather some  epoxy thickened with wood flour onto the scarf (I used dust from my sander again), position them longitudinally, send a finish nail through the joint to keep the sticks from sliding under clamping pressure (I drilled a pilot hole to make it easy), and repeat with the other two pieces to make a stack two high, then clamp the stack. It's another cold night, so I'll put a cardboard box around the glue joint and put a light inside.

Laying out the panels

The epoxy was a bit slow because, well, it's January. It took two days to cure. The second day was chilly for Santa Cruz standards - in the low 50s - so I enclosed the joints inside a makeshift box and put a heater in the box to keep the epoxy warm (every 10 degree temp increase doubles the reaction rate).

After the epoxy cured, I cleaned the panels up with a sander then marked the stations according to the offsets in the plans and laid out the sides and bottom panels using a fairing baton. Here, I'm transferring the full-size bow profile from the plans onto one of the bottom panels by poking a sharp awl through the paper into the wood. I cut a little window out of the plans so I could see to line up the paper correctly. Next I"ll screw the two side blanks together, and the two bottom blanks together, cut them out with a jigsaw two at a time, and finally touch up the edges with a hand plane.

Lam Sandwich

There are a couple of things to pay attention to when you're gluing the scarf joints. The first is aligning the panels so they'll have a straight edge. I popped a bright orange chalk line on my bench top to serve as a guide. If you wind up with 16 foot blanks not properly aligned, it's really no big deal - you'll just have to pop a line on the blanks themselves to serve as a baseline when you do the layout. Hopefully these will be straight enough that I'll be able to use the edge of the panel as a baseline. Less cutting that way.

The other thing to get right is clamping the joints. Because you've cut little ramps into the wood, and you'll be lathering them up with slippery glue mixed with a bit of thickener (I used dust from the bag of my finishing sander), they have a tendency to slide apart if you don't clamp them down really well along the length of the boards. Alternatively, you can apply the glue, line things up, then hammer a couple little finishing nails through the scarf joints to keep them from sliding. And of course, before you do that, put tape along the scarf lines (both sides) and wax paper between the sheets to keep the scarf joints clean along the glue lines and the sheets from sticking together when the excess glue squeezes out. If you look closely, you can see the blue painter's tape under the board. It's on each side of each panel. To supply the clamping force, I cut a 2x4 a couple inches longer than the blanks are wide, and I screwed one end of it to the benchtop and clamped the other to the edge of the bench. Now it's just a matter of waiting for the epoxy to react...

8 + 8 = 16LT

Making the scarf joints to glue the 8 foot blanks into 16 foot blanks has the reputation of being one of the hardest parts about building this boat from plans (rather than the kit, which comes with pre-cut panels that go together via jigsaw puzzle joints), but it's not really hard at all. It took more time to recondition my plane and sharpen the blade than it did to make the scarf joints. A sharp tool is the key - mine's sharp enough to cut your eye if you look at it too long. And notice in the pic below that I put it down on its side, not on the shoe. If ever I put a plane down on the shoe when my grandfather, who was a carpenter, was around, he would walk over and grab my hand and make me pick it back up and put it down correctly. Teaching via external control of my motor neurons. My grandfather is the old guy in the middle. I'm the little pissed-off kid on the left. Apparently, I wasn't old enough to hold a turnip of my own.

So with your sharp tool at the ready, you measure 1 1/4 inches and mark a line on each panel, offset a stack of panels to these lines, with the bottom one aligned with the edge of your workbench, and start planing. The stair-step panel arrangement holds the plane at the proper angle, and it's really quite easy to cut the scarfs uniformly - the ply reveal gives you a constant indicator of how even you're cutting. (BTW, I built the workbench with this project in mind: it's about 12' long and 14" wide - plenty adequate for the project but it doesn't take up my whole porch.) 

Once the scarfs are cut, the leading edges are paper thin, so they're obviously really fragile. To keep from dinging them up, I clamped some scrap wood on the ends to protect them until it's time to do the glue-up.

The first cut is the deepest

Here's a nice exploded view of the kayak from the construction manual.  If you order the kit, it comes with all the pieces pre-cut. If you're building from plans only, you get to make them yourself.

 At $70 a sheet, you measure at least three times and cut once. The sides and bottom panels start out as straight rips. If you're working by yourself, 4X8 sheet product is not wieldy especially if you don't have the luxury of having a table saw set up for cutting panels, so to help hold the outflow to prevent the sheet from flipping up off the blade I nailed a support to the porch rail.

One other detail... the side panels will be made from the 9.5 inch wide blanks ripped on the table saw, and the bottom panels will be gotten out of the 11 inch wide blanks. But if you use your table saw to rip your plywood to make all four bottom panel blanks, you won't have enough panel left to make the aft hatch. Instead, you have to cut one of the bottom blanks with a jigsaw. Study the panel cutting layout on the plans (page two) and you'll see why. So after I cut two 9.5 inch blanks and one 11 inch blank from each 4X8 sheet I just did a quick and dirty layout of the remaining bottom panel (measured using the edge as baseline and added a half inch or so) and cut it with a jigsaw. Just to check, I put the full-sized aft hatch cover template on the remainder before I cut - plenty of wood left...

Materials

The boat goes together from 3 sheets of 4mm Okoume marine plywood and a half sheet of the 6mm. It ain't cheap (~ $70 a sheet), but it's very high quality. Because I'm a cheap bastard, I was tempted to use lauan at $10 a sheet, but if you've ever used lauan, you know that it's full of voids and the filler between the plies is flimsy wooden styrofoam. Of course, Allen's boat uses rigid foam between epoxy and glass and it's stupendously strong, and given that most of the strength derives from the layup of epoxy and glass, I suspect that lauan would work just fine. But word from the CLC shop tips page nudged me up the food chain. Since I'll be putting a few hundred bucks worth of epoxy, glass, and fittings into the boat, I decided to throw in for good wood. I got it from the folks at Edensaw in Port Townsend, WA, along with some clear straight grain fir for the sheer clamps.

O.K., so here's really the way it fell out. Uncle Stinky bought this wood from Edensaw so that he could build a kayak at the same time as Crescent, but with his many projects in the works, this one didn't come to fruition before his travels continued. He generously left the wood in the greenhouse for us to use. Thus, I'm making a boat from really quality wood. Those who know Uncle Stinky know that he never never never buys cheap shite - only the best. In this case, Joubert Ply.

The Joubert seal signifies that it meets or exceeds British Standard 1088. It's registered with Lloyds of London to be free of voids, be of uniform thickness and be glued together with uniform glue spread and pressure, and to be low in formaldehyde out-gassing - as if I give a shite about out-gassing.  But if it's good enough for Lloyd and for Uncle Stinky, I'm sure it'll work for me.

I have a plan...

The plans and construction manual cost $70, which gets you a detailed step-by-step procedure, drawings with offsets, and full-sized templates for the tricky shapes, like the lines on the bow and stern, the hatch coaming pieces, and the like. Also, with the purchase of a plans set (which is really a build license), you get to call the CLC shop in Annapolis and ask questions. These are really Crescent's plans - she's gonna build her boat later. When she starts, we'll send CLC another 10 bucks for an additional build license.

The plans don't actually come in the wooden box. I threw that together to give Crescent the plans in for her birthday. It's made of scrap redwood left over from the outdoor shower I built in September, which was made of scrap redwood from the city dump. I'm a cheap bastard.

What to build

So, while my brother is busy in Hood River, Oregon, building Mariana, an ultra high-tech blue water 44 foot sailing catamaran, I decided to knock together a more modest vessel here in Santa Cruz. If my job doesn't get in the way of my free time, I'll be paddling my Chesapeake Light Craft 16LT kayak out past the point break at Steamer Lane by mid-spring late spring.

I chose the CLC boat because quite a number of people posted favorable things about it on the Internet, including a bunch of readers of Sea Kayaker magazine (who knew there was a mag for sea kayakers). They voted it the best D-I-Y kayak out there. I know fock-all about kayaks, but you gotta assume that the readership of SK mag is obsessed with them, so it seemed like a good enough endorsement.