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.

Coaming in pieces

I decided to do the glue-up of the coaming in two stages, partly to make it easier to handle, and partly so that I could clean up the outer edges of the spacers. First, I clamped them in place and marked the cockpit hole, and cut it out fairly close (+1/4 inch) to the actual size to make clamping easier. Next I slathered the spacers with thickened epoxy and clamped them in place with a layer of wax paper under them so they wouldn't stick to the deck. The result: two spacers, formed to fit the curve of the deck. The picture shows them with the outer edges sanded.

Gluing the coaming assembly to the deck was a bit fiddly. It took a lot of clamps.

I found it was easiest to start by clamping the assembly firmly at the aft centerline, adding clamps going forward. Cockpit = lamprey.

By the way, you know how it's a herd of buffalo, a murder of crows, a gaggle of geese, a shrewdness of apes (really), a pod of whales, a shiver of sharks (no, really), a parliament of owls, a troubling of goldfish (really, I'm not kidding), and so forth? I'd like to suggest a grasp of lamprey.

And when dey was no crawdads, we et sand..

I wet out the deck with as little epoxy as I could to save weight. The first coat went on with a bondo spreader, and I used just enough to wet out the cloth completely, scraping all of the excess off. The second and third coats went on with a foam roller - very thin coats, just enough to fill the weave of the cloth, with an overnight cure between first and second coats, and about 4 hours between second and third coats.

After 24 hours of curing, I began sanding the deck. I started with 100 grit and knocked the high spots off, being careful not to sand the edges along the chines of the boat. It's incredibly easy to sand right through the glass and into the wood whenever there's a sharp curve or edge. Best to sand those spots by hand or with the sander on lowest speed. After the 100 grit, I moved to 150 grit, then 220 grit. Yep, it's skipping grit, but I ain't building a piano. Also, I plan to install rubrails, which means I don't have to be overly fastidious about the round-over at the chine. I hit that enough to remove the high spots to make sure the rubrail will draw up tight.  All told, it took me no more than about an hour to sand the deck in its entirety (probably less, because whenever you're sanding, one minute feels like five). Next, coaming and hatches.

Glass on deck

It rained buckets yesterday so I decided not to glass the deck, thinking the excess humidity might fog the epoxy, which I didn't want because I'm gonna finish the deck bright. This morning, however, was blue skies. Here, I've got the glass laid on the deck (one 16 foot piece of 27" glass - 3.6 oz), and the edge cut so that there's a one inch overlap down the hulls. I also applied masking tape just below the rub-rail line, sticking only the top edge to the hull, with the bottom edge flared outward a bit. This is a surfboard glasser's trick - any epoxy resin that runs over the edge will run down the tape and drip on the ground instead of down the hull. Makes for no drips or runs, which keeps me from having to sand the runs away after the resin cures.

I used a light misting of 3M 45 spray adhesive along the edges just to keep the glass in place. I find that the adhesive makes the job a lot easier: the glass doesn't shift around or float. It just stays right where you put it. This was necessary today especially. It was very windy and the glass was getting blown around a bit.