The water is wide, I can't cross o'er

Here are a couple pics of Ji Xia, enjoying the first imaginary voyage - across the driveway.

Cartop Carrier

I knocked together a really simple cartop carrier out of some redwood I had left over from my outdoor shower project. It's very simple, lightweight, and very strong. The most difficult aspect of building it was making sure the padded supports sit correctly so that the weight is spread out evenly. I padded the supports with the stuff I had left over from the seat back padding (which I fished out of a dumpster one night outside a skateboard deck/surfboard kickpad company). 

Here it is on top of the car. It's quite easy to pack up. I just throw some straps over the deck, making sure to run the straps above the deck beams so that I can really tighten things down well. Then I just cinch the whole thing down - boat plus carrier - to the roof rack. No need to strap the carrier to the roof rack separately. If the boat arrives at your destination, the carrier will be there too.

As a testament to its functionality and ability to handle the forces it will face: I strapped the kayak/carrier onto the car with a couple surfboard straps from Dakine and drove from Santa Cruz to Hood River not too long ago going 75-80 miles an hour and with a 50+ mile an hour gusting crosswind through the Columbia River Gorge. I watched the bow shift about a little with the stronger gusts, but boat and car arrived unscathed. 

Batten down the hatches

 CLC recommends what's become a standard method to keep hatch covers snugly in place: nylon webbing and fastex buckles. Easy enough. It's really beginning to feel like a CLC kayak.

They also recommend installing bungee cord keepers to hold things to the deck. I had to buy a bit more nylon webbing than I initially estimated - all that folding over at the edges and doubling up at the buckles adds up.

For the seat bottom, rather than build one myself (plans include drawings and instructions to do so), I just opened my wallet and bought one at West Marine. It's a stick-on thing, and it's quite comfortable.  Can't remember how much it cost. Couldn't have been too much, though, because I'm a cheap bastard and if it was too expensive, I'd probably just wind up using a stadium seat or some nonsense like that.

 CLC sells what looks exactly like a fine solution for a backrest for about 30 bucks or so. It's a nylon thing, sewn with padding and straps, that you screw to the inside of the cockpit. But I'm a cheap bastard, so I decided to make my own backrest. I cut out a couple pieces of ply, slathered them with epoxy, and after looking around for a somewhat back-shaped curve I could use as a gluing mold, I noticed my '69 Chevy C20 with it's 16.5" rims. Perfect. So I strapped the glue-lam assembly to the spare tire with ratchet straps, blocks, braces, and lots of clamps and let it cure overnight. The result was a nicely curved backrest piece, very light and very strong.

I had some waterproof padding lying around, so I stuck it on the seat back with contact cement, then attached some nylon strapping and bungee cord to the back so that I could suspend it in the cockpit in an adjustable way.

First I attached some nylon strapping to the boat just behind the hip braces on each side, choosing screws carefully so they wouldn't poke through the hull.  (And now you can see the hip braces - those trapazoidal pieces, which I'll fit with closed cell foam to make a snug fit).

I attached the seat back to the cockpit strapping with some fastex adjustable buckles. I then screwed some little nylon bungee cord holders to the bottomside of the deck just below the coaming. The bungee cord is just to keep the seatback from flopping around when you lean forward.  The whole apparatus is very comfortable, it was easy enough to make, and it came out great, but the question you gotta ask is, "How much is $30 bucks worth to you?" If you're (a) loaded, or (b) not a cheap bastard like I am, it's probably worth the money to just buy the one CLC sells. 

Cockpit paint and footbrace installation

I decided to paint the cockpit. Before I did, though, I should have installed some hip braces, which make it so you can wedge foam pieces in there and give yourself a nice snug fit when you're paddling. So the upshot is that when I did install the braces, I had to sand some of the paint off to get down to a surface that would be good for gluing. In this photo, if you look closely, you can see the footbrace block on the starboard side. That's what the sliding footbrace will mount onto.

Here's one of the little nylon spacers I used for the footbraces. It's snug on the stainless bolt, and also fits inside the slot of the footbrace. I cut it so that it was just a bit thicker than the sliding footbrace, so that when I fit a washer and a wingnut on the bolts, they'll tighten down snug enough to keep the footbraces from sliding. I'm really pleased with the way they work, but the next pair I make is going to have some more intelligently shaped footpegs. I also think that I didn't really need to make them so adjustable. As it is, they'll accommodate heights from about 4'2" to about 6'6".

Let it shine

Now, the fun part. With the hull and deck sanded smooth, I installed the rub rails, which is the last step before brushing on the finish. I scarfed these from some 2x4 stock I got at the Home Despot, ripped to the proper dimension and planed smooth. You'll probably have to go through a giant stack of 2x4s to find one that's knot-free enough to use for this. I've found that it's easier to find clear grain if you look through the longer stuff. Seems like all the 8 footers were in the forest about a week before, and are cut from saplings that were about 5 years old, but the 12 footers seem to come from better quality logs.


I then cleaned the whole thing with some thinner, then let it dry before applying the finish. I used Z-Spar polyurethane. The finish will come out very smooth if you follow these basic application tips: Apply the finish with strokes that go crossways first, then without dipping the brush in the can again, go across the crosswise strokes the long way, starting from dry to wet so that you don't put the brush down into wet urethane.

About a half hour after I had applied the final coat, a damp fog rolled in so I decided to bring the boat into the house to dry. Here it is sitting at the kitchen bar.

Hatches

The next thing to be done is to cut holes in the deck. If you poke around on the web, you'll find all sorts of different configurations, including some really nice round hatches fitted with store-bought hatch covers, but needless to say, I didn't buy any of those, because I'm a cheap bastard. I just used the template that came with the plans to mark and then cut out the opening with a jigsaw. I'm also holding the rim piece, which I cut out using the band saw that Road Dog rescued from the house behind the cotton gin in Northport, and that nearly took his finger off years later. Not shown are the stiffeners and doubler pieces that will get glued underneath so that when it's all glued up, the deck at the opening will be triple thickness.

To keep things neat and drip-free, I masked the opening so that when the rip piece was in place, there was about an eighth-inch gap between the tape and the rim. I then slathered everything with thickened epoxy and held everything in place with a grasp of clamps, making a nice little fillet around the outside edge with a gloved finger. In the photo at right, I've taken the masking tape up, but you can still see some remnants of the tape under the c-clamps.

The hatch covers are easy to make. You cut out the hatch frame pieces and clamp the hatch pieces to them, which holds the hatch into the correct curve, and the whole thing is reinforced with glass tape and glued together.  After everything's cured, i brushed a couple coats of unthickened epoxy on, paying particular attention to the edges, to make sure they'll be waterproof.

Sanding down the toilet seat

The cockpit coaming sanded down fairly rapidly, and when you start shaping the round-over with the sander, it's easy enough to keep everything symmetrical and smooth, because there are more plies in the coaming than flies at a picnic, and so you can really see clearly whether things are even or not. Just keep the thing looking right as you sand and in the end, it will look right.

Here are some more pictures of the sanded coaming. It's a nice mix of easy-to-do and looks-really-good, which makes it a particularly satisfying part of the project. And I have no idea why some people call this type of kayak cockpit a toilet seat.
 

Chickens suck at calculus - frustrating for all involved.

I took quite a bit of time away from this blog to see if I could teach this chicken to understand calculus. It was a waste of time. This chicken is absolutely worthless in that direction. I'll finish the blog now.