Out of the wilderness...

After my last post Alex and I went through the protracted process of moving interstate. As such the partly finished boat has been in storage for the past 8 months or so.

We've now moved into an older cottage on 20 acres in rural NSW and while it has more space, less of it is covered and suitable for boat-building. For my workshop I've commandeered what I imagine used to be the garage which has a semi-leaking roof and dirt floor. The boat is still in its storage packaging to protect it from any rain etc, and over the next few weeks I'll continue unpacking all the components, epoxy etc and also putting some road base or similar on the floor so it's not as dusty.

One upside of the delay I thought of last week was that the slow curing epoxy that I got in the kit because I was going to be working in summer will now be suitable again as we're already into the first month of spring.

Incidentally, the Hawkesbury Classic is due to start next weekend (22nd October 2011), so if anyone is still reading this who is competing this year, good luck! All going to plan I'll see you on the water for next year's event.

Moving house

Just to complicate things, I've been offered a job back in my home town and as a result, my wife and I are moving 9 hours north.

This is going to make building the kayak, or moving it at least, very tricky. I still haven't yet started to stitch the strips together, so at the very least it will be easier to move a flat pack but I'll have to get my hands on copious amounts of bubble wrap and fragile stickers so the removalists don't ruin anything.

Seeing we'll be bunking with my folks for a few months until we find a place and sell our house, I'll be able to use Dad's shed to do some work after I head up there. He's got plenty of tools I can use, and has done this before, so the build should go a little more smoothly once I'm there.

Back after a short hiatus

With the Christmas break, rain, work and house renovations, my Coho has taken a bit of a back seat recently. Apologies to anyone who had been following me recently with no updates. Access to blogspot blogs has also been restricted on my work laptop for some reason so updating this now needs to be done at home rather than in my lunch hour.

Excuses aside, here's where I'm up to:

I finished doing the other sides of the deck panel joins like I mentioned I was pondering. I took a dose of my own rules and followed the instructions to the letter. Now there are just a few more brief steps before I can start stitching the panels together.
Tonight I reinforced the deck panels at the front of the entry hole. I'm sure there's a technical word for the entry 'hole' but for now, that's what it's called. Much more refined I'm sure.
This involved cutting a few pieces of 3 1/2 inch pieces of ply to size with a jigsaw and gluing them to the underside of the deck with an epoxy & wood flour mix about the same consistency as honey. This, I assume, is so that when using the deck to lever yourself into the 'hole' when entering the kayak, you don't punch your hands through the deck of the boat. You can see a few photos below.

Here's the wood flour & epoxy mix used to glue the deck reinforcements onto the deck. It's just epoxy using the same 2:1 mix as normal, but with wood flour mixed in. Wood flour as far as I know is a more sophisticated 'I'm a woodworker' term for fine sawdust.

As you may be able to tell, my new favourite container for mixing epoxy is old sliced pineapple tins. Perfect size.

Here's the cut-to-size ply about to be glued over the  deck. I think I may have joined the reinforcing ply a little too far forward from what it should have been. When it's cured I'll see if I need to put another one closer to the 'hole'.

Here's the reinforcement in relation to the hatch hole. There should be room for another strip if I need to put it in. I guess time will tell.

As an aside, I'd forgotten how nice it is to be back out in the shed listening to music and working away. Really  relaxing and a pretty sweet way to unwind from a job that's starting to give me the shirts.