Posts filed under 'pygmy sea kayaks'
Okay, so I thought I was going to keep an in-progress journal about building the kayaks, but I was too tired at the end of the day to keep up on it.
After reading through a couple of forums, particularly Dan’s journal at West Coast Paddler’s I went out and bought Moore’s Kayaks You can Build which covers the Pygmy Coho. In the book, Moores suggests only gluing the butt joints on 1 side.
The issue is aesthetic - taping and gluing the butt joints on the outside means that there will always be a slight bump at the butt joints as well as a higher potential for messing up with the scraper when cleaning up.
On my boat, we’d already glued both sides. The epoxy had to be scraped to bring down high points and feather the edges. Unfortunately, I had a standard scraper and its edges tore into the plywood which was a real PITA to fix. I went out and bought a better carbide-tipped scraper and that made all the difference in the world.
If you’re building a boat, I would say that the carbide tipped scraper was one of the most important tool purchases I could have made. The other most important tool purchase was 3 good rasps. I’ll probably write later about tools since I’m kind of a gearhead anyway.
So, we got the right scraper which made a world of difference on the second boat which we only glued on one side. I decided that the experimental boat #1 would be mine.
Cleaning up the excess from the edges of the plywood strip was best done with a rasp, not a razor blade. I’m sure that if we were to build another boat, we would use a lot less epoxy in the butt-gluing step. It ended up taking us most of the first week just doing the butt joints and then cleaning them up. I had numbered the mylanar with a sharpie pen to make it easy to reuse on the second boat, but half of the mylanar pieces were placed ink-side down which … transferred to the wood and had to be sanded out. We were very lucky that the ink didn’t travel all the way to the wood. Note to self: don’t use ink that contains alcohol (i.e. Sharpies).
In any case, suffice it to say that gluing the butt joints helped me temper my cavalier approach to building the boats and in the end was a harmless lesson. All mistakes were fixable, just more work.
Here are my tips for this step:
- Follow Moore’s suggestion and glue butt joints on the inside only. Just be sure that when moving the strips around, you fully support the joints.
- Pay close attention to how much epoxy you’re using. You really don’t need much to float the tape.
- When you put down the mylanar, make sure that you squeeze out all the air. Air bubbles create a lot of clean up and probably compromise the structure if you get any air bubbles in the joint.
- Use as much weight as you can get on it. Our clay bricks weren’t heavy enough. We filled up yogurt containers with sand and placed those on top of the bricks. Diving and fishing weights worked best.
- Invest in a carbide tipped scraper and good rasps. I paid $15 for the scraper at Home Depot. Our local hardware shop had better quality rasps than Home Depot. I paid $24 each for 2 larger sized rasps and $12 for a small rasp.
September 28th, 2006
Monday:
We got up early and went to see how yesterday’s work turned out.
For a first stab, I think it turned out pretty well. We did use a little too much epoxy. On a couple of pieces the mylanar had moved around so much when we weighted it that the scrap plywood pieces on top came into contact with epoxy. This was partially because I was too conservative with the mylanar, I think we floated a little too much epoxy and we were tired and uncomfortable from kneeling on concrete by the end of yesterday so probably a little less attentive.
Comfort is key to paying attention to details
Fortunately, the epoxy was easy enough to clean up with a sharp razor on the edges and I was able to tease off the epoxied scrap edges without losing any veneer from my kayak. The trick is to use a sharp razor blade and leave bits of the scrap plywood on the veneer. It can be sanded out.
If it had been really bad, I could have used the router bit on the dremel to cut around the epoxied plywood scrap so that it could then be sanded out.
So, we spent about 45 minutes cleaning up the edges - it’s easier to do while the epoxy is still curing. I think there’s a planer fitting for my dremel that I might invest in for the final edge clean up. I noticed when A initially started using a little hand planer on the edges, her tendancy was to tip it so she could see where the blade was cutting, but that will give the edges a bevel which we don’t want.
Next step: (after work) sanding the other side and gluing it. I’ll duct tape my sander to a small vacuum cleaner to keep the dust down. We’ll be ready to start glueing boat 2 tomorrow!
July 17th, 2006
Sunday:
We rushed out to the garage to begin planning our day. The first step is to tape and epoxy all the butt-ends together; 6 strips per side with 2 butt ends per strip on each boat.
The instructions say to do 1 side at a time, but we have a large garage so we figured we should be able to do 1 boat at a time which would save us 2 days in the overall project.
Of course, that required a second reorganization of the garage. Should have read the manual before building our benches as we didn’t need them for this stage and we had to move them out of the way (losing all our shimming and leveling). We also took care to thoroughly sweep the floor so our plywood strips wouldn’t be marked or pitted when weighted down.
When we bought our bed last winter, I had saved the plastic so we covered the floor and our bench tops with plastic.
The instructions say to work on the floor and use bricks to weight down the joints so they’re flat. However, the last kayak project in the garage had left pools of hardened epoxy so we had to find places that were bump-free to put the joints on top of. We then dug up some bricks from around the yard and washed them off. It turned out that we did not have enough bricks so we tried to compensate by using clamps on the strongbacks.
If you’re reading this because you’re building a kayak … the clamps were a pain in the rear. Use bricks. Buy them if you need to, they’re cheap. What ended up working best for us was diving weights.
Here is what we did in a step-by-step format (the instructions are well written, but they’re in narrative format, and I prefer to review steps when I’m in the middle of putting something together.)
- lay out all the strips you’re going to epoxy with the stickers facing up and the ends to be joined together abutting.
- check for any plywood manufacturer stickers - there was one on this kit, but it pulled right off without needing to be razored and the sticker residue sanded our with just a few strokes of a rubber sanding bar. I’m guessing from the repeated comments in the manual that some folks have a problem identifying which side is up and which is the inside of the boat. The stickers are on the inside of the boat which is good since that’s a good place to practice epoxying.
- collect all the weights needed: for 1 boat, you need 24 weights PLUS 12 weights to place on each panel as you’re gluing. It’s July, so we could wet about 6 joints at a time before the epoxy began to set up, which was about what our knees could handle on the concrete before needing a stretch break. You need those extra weights to hold the 2 butts flat until you finish floating the tape and put the final weight on top.
- You then need to cut the tape and mylanar for each butt joint. I then used the cut pieces of mylanar to mark off scrap plywood (which is placed on top to evenly distribute the weight) and cut the plywood on the band saw to be smaller than the mylanar. Because we’re building 2 boats I numbered each piece to be reused on the other boat.The instructions say to cut the mylanar to overlap a little on each joint. I cut mine to overlap about 1/8 inch and that was too conservative. I have to buy some more for the other side and 2nd boat which I’ll cut to be at least 1/2 inch overlap if not more.
- The epoxy is more viscuous than I’m accustomed to - I usually use epoxy with wood flour, so I was a little unprepared for the movement when weighting it. I think too that we could use a little less epoxy.
So, setting up and gluing the butt joints turned into an all day project - I had expected to spend the morning on it. I think though that the other side and the second boat will go very quickly now that we’ve got the hang of it. We’re still on schedule.
July 17th, 2006
“A” worked on a shell script for automating new wiki creation in her wiki farm at work all last week. So by the time the morning arrived to go pick up our kayak kits, her dreams had merged into automating her kayak building shell script (hence the title for those of you who have no idea what I’m gabbling on about).
We usually rent Eddylines from Boston Harbor Marina for tooling around the Eld Inlet in southern Puget Sound, but there’s only so much exploring one can do from the same launch point. We’ve both always wanted to do more touring and as we grow older, wilderness camping via boat is more enticing than hurking our gear through the wilderness on foot like we’ve always done.
For months I’ve watched Craigs List, eBay and other local listings for good used touring sea kayaks. Something with good initial stability and really good secondary stability. Our eventual intent as we improve our skills and gain experience is to explore the San Juans, the Queen Charlottes and the coastal Olympic National Park.
But … sea kayaks are an expensive little toy! The secondary market for touring ranges between $1.7k -$5k per boat. I’ve always thought wooden boats had more style than composites but strip kayaks take far too long to build. Most people seem to spend at leat 2 years on them and I don’t like having unfinished projects that long, especially because I don’t know how long we’ll have access to our current workshop. I was reminded of pygmy boats which I always see at the wooden boat fairs, but had completely forgotten about. They make stitch ‘n’ glue sea kayak kits and the boats are both attractive and very sea worthy, designed specifically for sea kayaking in the Pacific Northwest. Best of all, they can (supposedly) be built in about 80 hours.
After much internet searching and reading, we decided we wanted to build pygmy boats - the coho model. Although we’re fairly confident that we’ll be happy with it, you don’t really know until after you use a boat for a season. So, one of our deciding points was worst case scenario, if we decide we don’t like them, we should be able to at least sell them for what we’ve got invested. So it’s a relatively low risk investment. I highly doubt that’ll happen though. The boats are well designed by enthusiasts and the kits are complete and reportedly have good instructions - always a good combination.
Oh, and the price - less than $1k each for a boat that I think is more attractive as well as more functional than a lot of manufactured alternatives.
The boats are supposed to be buildable in about 80 hours time. Our vacation begins in 4 weeks and we plan to camp at Lake Ozette, which will be our maiden kayak camping trip.
Saturday morning:
It was hard to keep this schedule: the brakes went out on the car earlier in the week and had to be fixed, my computer completely melted down Friday morning and my day was spent trying to coax data off a damaged hard drive instead of setting up our workspace. Without our looming vacation date, I think we would have procrastinated another week. But it was a beautiful day, the Lavendar Festival was in full swing in Sequim (just up the road from Port Townsend) and we needed to get started.
We chose the coho model for it’s multi-chine design and maneuverability. The trips we take will likely be no longer than 2 weeks and there should be plenty of stowage for our gear. The stability also appealed to us as we’re beginner/intermediate paddlers.
In any case, so today we drove up to Port Townsend and examined all the models in the show room and the Coho was definitely the model we wanted. It was well worth the drive to fully examine a built boat before buying the kit.
When we got home, we cleared out the garage and made work benches - our landlord’s father had built 2 canvas baidarkas on a strongback, so we just had to make another surface with plywood and sawhorses and then level them. Of course, cleaning out a garage is always somewhat time consuming so that was all we had time for today.
We both fell asleep reading through our build manuals.
July 16th, 2006