Lift off! The hull takes shape

So after a few years it's all action now. I've started stitching together the hull panels and it's taking shape surprisingly quickly.

Essentially, the process involves aligning the bow seam on the panels, and joining a few stitches to make sure the panels are in the right spot. After that, the holes are drilled and the panel loosely wired together in all the holes, every 6 inches.

After the first two left and right panels are wired together, it's essentially a rinse and repeat process, aligning the panels, wiring them loosely, and then tightening the wires on both sides at the time to firm up the rigidity of the hull lines. I'm halfway through the third panel at the moment, and it'd be fair to say the second wind of the construction process has arrived.

The panels within the hull are temporary support braces to make sure the profile of the hull is uniform and the chines don't bulge out or fall in. They're only wired at the keel at the moment, and are fairly annoying as they flop about and get in the way until they're wired to the rest of the hull. The wiring together doesn't happen until all 4 hull panels are in place, so until then they're just in the way.


I was going to make a comment about the bending over killing my back, but looks like I already covered that in an earlier post about Tip #5. Get a decent height workbench. In fact, as you can see from my pictures, 'workbench' is a bit of a stretch, and I'm still working on two fold out trellis tables.

Back... Again.

After my last post, there was a fair bit of no progress on the Coho. The partially completed boat was in mediocre storage in one of our sheds while we built a new shed, complete with a roof that didn't leak and a real concrete floor.

As of last week, the Coho is out of it's stale wrapping and back on the table. Unfortunately there is a some very slight water damage, and a family of mice had set up a nest in the wrapping, staining and eating into some of the timber. It' only superficial though and the boat is back into the fore of my mind.

Progress updates will continue as I get back into the build.

First of all is the bevelling of the shear edges where the deck and hull meet, and then the drilling of the holes for the wiring in the stitch and glue process.

I'm on a deadline now. We're in the last month of summer and the epoxy I ordered back in October 2010 is the slow cure type, designed for hot climates. It won't cure below 25 degrees celsius, and hence I need to get my act together while the weather is still hot enough to cure the epoxy.

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.

Rain delays

With the extremely wet weather we've been having here recently I've not done much work on the Coho in the last 2 weeks. Persistent rains, thunderstorms, flooding and constantly high humidity have meant that I've been a bit hesitant to work on the boat for a couple reasons.

The first of these is that with increased humidity wood expands, and I don't want to be doing any work now that will be ruined when the dry, baking heat of the Canberra summer arrives (if it ever does) and the wood then contracts.

The second reason is that it's generally been pretty ordinary outside with the rain and wind, plus a trillion 'skeeters that seem to be procreating in my backyard seem fairly hellbent on eating me alive. Our backyard has pretty ordinary drainage due mainly to the fact that normally is never rains in Canberra and I've been nervously inspecting the shed each morning to make sure nothing has been damaged. All the ply is off the ground, but there are so many leaks in the shed roof it makes the US State Department look like... umm..... a well sealed roof? Wait, that doesn't quite work. You know what I mean - the flippin' roof leaks a lot.

I've been getting some comments that I've not been updating this blog enough (thanks AJ, Dowlo, Lukas) but it's because no work has been happening. Hence, here's a joke to keep you going until the rain stops, which should be sometime next century. It's good weather for ducks at the moment, so I thought a duck joke might be appropriate:


A duck walks into a pub and orders a schooner of beer and a ham sandwich. The barman looks at him and says, "Hey! You're a duck".

"I see your eyes are working", replies the duck.

"And you talk!" exclaims the barman.

"I see your ears are working", said the duck, "Now can I have my beer and my sandwich please?"

"Certainly", says the barman, "sorry about that, it's just we don't get many ducks in this pub. What are you doing round this way?".

"I'm working on the building site across the road", explains the duck. Then the duck drinks his beer, eats his sandwich and leaves.

This continues for weeks. Then one day the circus comes to town. The Ringleader of the circus comes into the pub and the barman says to him, "You're with the circus aren't you?, I know this duck that would be just brilliant in your circus, he talks, drinks beer and everything!".

"Sounds marvellous", says the ringleader, "get him to give me a call".

So the next day when the duck comes into the pub the barman says, "Hey Mr Duck, I reckon I can line you up with a top job, paying really good money!"

"Yeah?", says the duck, "Sounds great, where is it?"

"At the circus", says the barman.

"The circus?" the duck enquires.

"That's right", replies the barman.

"The circus?" the duck asks again.

"Yes" says the barman

"That place with the big tent?" the duck enquires.

"Yeah" the barman replies.

"With all the animals?" the duck questioned.

"Of Course" the barman replies.

"With the big canvas roof with the hole in the middle?" asks the duck.

"That's right!" says the barman.

The duck looks confused.

"What the f%$#k would they want with a plasterer?!!"

A little bit of positive reinforcement

I had a little success last night in finally being able to compare two sets of identical hull panels and found that they are in fact mirror images of each other. This means that my joins are done the right way and I haven't managed to cock anything major up just yet. The joins in the pictures below are the two uppermost hull panels, so just above the waterline. The hull panels are the most imprtant to get right in terms of alignment as they obviously affect the tracking of the boat, so it's good to see I'm trucking in the right direction.

Progress is still being made slowly, but having to go and do social things like a wedding for one of Alex's mates this Saturday in Wagga Wagga, plus inconveniences like having to eat dinner every night are really slowing me down. With any luck I'll get a good few hours of work done on Sunday but I suspect I'll be a little hungover so it remains to be seen how much work will actually be done, and how much time I'll just spend on the couch watching TV.

Construction begins - gluing the panels.

After taking stock of what was and wasn't damaged in transit, I've worked out I can begin gluing the panels together while I wait for the replacements to be sent from the States as mentioned previously.

I began gluing the panels together on Sunday with the first of the hull strips. Each strip comes in 3 pieces, and need to be glued and 'glassed together to form one long 17 foot strip which are subsequently stitched to form the hull.

Thinking the cement floor of the shed would be flat enough to begin, I started laying the panels out and quickly found that my shed floor wasn't as flat as I'd previously imagined. Having already mixed some epoxy together though, I figured I'd already started and should get to it before it thickened too much and I'd wasted the epoxy.

I think the two panels I ended up doing on the floor will be fine, but to fix the problem and make sure I was working on a level surface, I went and bought 2 trestle tables for $40 each from Bunnings, plus 2 2400x1200 MDF sheets and laid these on top. The effect was so much better and easier that I wondered why I hadn't thought of it beforehand, and also allowed me to work standing up rather than hunched on the ground. Much, much, much easier! I knew I'd try and launch into this before being really ready but thought it'd be OK. Now I'm properly ready and have reinforced the importance to myself of reading the instructions properly before doing too much.

Getting get back to the construction process, to join the panels together, you first wet a bit of epoxy on both sides of the join, then lay a small strip of fibreglass over the top and wet it out. Finally, a piece of plastic is laid over the epoxy once in place, and weighed down to ensure they stay together whilst gluing.

Seeing the epoxy on the wood for the first time has given a sneak peek at what the Okoume will look like once the whole boat is epoxied. Looking good!

The bottle holding the hardener that I threw out was going to cause a problem in that I wouldn't have a suitable bottle to mount the hand pump on - or so I thought! In a stroke of genius I realised that 2l fresh apple juice bottles are the almost the same height and have the same size opening as the 1 gallon resin bottles that the resin is supplied in. It's just a matter of refilling the juice bottle from the milk bottle I'm storing the rest of the hardener in, and Bob's your mother's brother, we're off and racing.
One shortcoming I've had is that I ordered slow-setting epoxy as I'd anticipated I would be building this in the middle of a hot baking Canberra summer where temps can reach 40 degrees in the heat of the afternoon and tend to stay above 30 degrees until about midnight. Dad's kayak took one and a half months to arrive so I figured I wouldn't be getting down to business until at least November. Shipping of less than a week, plus a cold snap over the last weekend to remind us summer isn't quite here yet has wrong footed me a bit. Pygmy gives you the choice of slow (for hot climates), medium (medium, obviously) and fast (for cold climates) setting hardener in their kits. This might be premature, but I'd guess a medium hardener might have been more appropriate.  I've had to put a few little heaters in the shed while I'm working at night, to speed things along a little. Hopefully the autumn sun beating down on the galvanised roof and sides of the shed while I'm at work will create a little oven and effectively bake the stuff while I'm away. The fast hardener needs a minimum temp of 23 degrees Celsius to cure, so I'm sure it'll be fine by tonight and I can glue the rest soon. The strips are quite long so gluing them all in one sitting isn't really possible unless you've got a huge workspace.

One other reason I was a bit hesitant to glue too many was that working only from instructions means you're always a bit unsure whether you're doing the right thing. This way if I screw it up I only screw up 3 or 4 panels rather than all of them. I guess the moments of truth will come tonight when I get home and see how they've come out.

One thing's for sure - Tip #1: Make sure you get a decent work space to do these! So much easier on the tables than the floor!

Oh, and another lesson from the book of Coho - the reason the manual asks for 4 x cheap bristle paintbrushes is that it's pretty much impossible to clean the semi-thickened epoxy from a paintbrush after working with it, it's just easier to throw it out. When it comes to brushes, cheap is good here. Likewise the container used to mix the epoxy and dip your brush in. Tip #2: Start collecting margarine, butter, yogurt, and any other wide mouth plastic container once you decide to decide to build one of these, you'll need them!

The Coho Arrives!!!

All credit to FedEx, the packages arrived this morning a day ahead of its estimated arrival date. I got a call from them last night to arrange payment of the customs duties, and sure enough it was released and arrived at my office this morning via courier.

3 boxes arrived. One with the wood panels in it that I'm yet to open, I figured it'd be a pain in the arse to re-seal it and get it to the car this afternoon.

The second had the rudder, coamings, hatch kit, braces and so on.

Third and final box held all the fibreglass cloth, epoxy & hardener, syringes, wood flour, unfortunately the resin and hardener look like they have leaked. No damage done, but it's a bit messy and has meant everything in the box is very, very sticky.

Looking forward to getting them home and checking everything off. If the rain stops, I might even be able to get out to the shed and begin work, or at least a trip to Bunnings to get some sort of table jigged up as a work bench.

The Pygmy Coho Hi

So, about the kayak...

It's a Pygmy Coho Hi Volume model, which ships as a kit from Port Angeles, Washington State US. Here's what I've managed to learn about it before it actually arrives.

As far as materials go, it's made from 4mm Okoume marine grade plywood, sandwiched between fibreglass and epoxy for strength. According to Wikipedia, Okoume is an African hardwood similar to mahogany, epoxied, it has a honey-like colour and the grain really stands out when finished well. Apparently, with the fibreglass-epoxy construction, it's both stronger and lighter than most other glassed boats.

The seat is an inflatable pad on the floor of the boat, which while sounding primitive is actually really comfortable. It has a backband, and in the Hawkesbury last year the only discomfort I experienced after 15 hours of paddling was sore hamstrings after sitting with my legs flat because the footrests in my old man's boat were too close, and I took them out. One of the benefits of a build your own boat is that I can tailor the footpegs to my leg length so I'm not anticipating the same problem here.

It's 17 feet 6 inches long, and has a beam of 23 inches. It's got a nice long bow which looks like it'll slice through waves and chop well and be good in the ocean.

I mentioned the rudder before, which according to Jim @ Pygmy isn't really needed, but I'd still like it there anyway, if only to keep it going the direction I want it to.

The construction method is called Stitch & Glue, and entails strips of pre-cut wood which are wired together along the joins (the stitches) so that the hull takes shape, and then glued with epoxy (the glue, obviously) so that the wires can be removed. These joins are called 'chines' and there are two different types - hard chine and multi chine boats which have different characteristics, not that I could tell you what they are.

• Hard Chine are one join below the waterline, such as Pygmy's Arctic Tern and are apparently more traditionally Greenland shaped kayaks. They have that flat looking bottom and I just wasn't that into them, not for any real reason except I liked the Multi Chined boats better.
• Multi Chines are multiple lines below the waterline, like the Coho, and are a more rounded look.

NEWSFLASH: After typing the above and trying to find an academic explanation for the difference I tried to explain above, I've found Pygmy actually have a page with an explanation and hull comparisons. How about that? Amazing what you can find when you look for it...

I can say that the fibreglass fabric over the deck and hull is all but completely invisible when finished. All you see is the amazing grain in the wood, protected by a hard coat or epoxy. Dad's boat looks amazing and I can imagine how proud I will feel when it's finished, assuming I don't cock it up.

The boat is still in Hono-bloody-lulu according to FedEx.

Accessorising and ordering.

So now that I've decided on the boat - A Coho Hi from Pygmy Boats Inc, I need to work out how I want it fitted out.

Jim from Pygmy was pretty adamant that the Coho doesn't require a rudder and can be turned by leaning the boat - lean left to go right, right to go left. He encouraged me to paddle it first and then get one if I want it later. The chines on the hull mean the hull of the boat is curved when leaned on an angle, and off it goes. Dad hasn't got one on his, and the system works pretty well, except it struggled a little in a strong crosswind when paddling with a following tide. I had a bit of trouble then, but I guess that's to be expected in most boats. All this aside, I've decided to fit a rudder. Purely because I figure I can fit it and retract it when not in use, but it'll be harder if I decide I want it down the track, so into the basket it goes.

I haven't seen a rudder attached to a Coho anywhere except for one of the boats on a doco I found called 'Paddle to Seattle', which as a bit of a tangent, looks awesome. Two mates paddling from Alaska to Seattle down the inside passage in Pygmy Coho's they built themselves. They're funny buggers too, I'm very tempted to grab the DVD. Maybe my Coho could do something as awesome as that one day! one of them has a rudder on their boats, so I guess mine won't be the only one with one. The Smart-track rudder looks pretty small too, I like it.

Also making the shopping basket are deck hatches for stowage and bungee cord for the deck to hold maps, a bit of food and so on in easy reach.

I ordered the boat and got a shipment tracking number for FedEx so I can see where the boat is up to, just to make the wait all that more agonising. Ordering via the website was easy, the shipping was not shown, but Jim had told me that, and he sent me an email prior to finalising confirming the total shipping charge and that the order was complete. Shipping was about US$355 to the ACT including insurance and brokerage.

The parcel is now in Honolulu according to FedEx, and is expected on the 14th of October. Can't wait! Turns out checking the FedEx tracking page every 30 mins doesn't make it get here any quicker. I think I'd rather it was a mystery and just arrived one day next week, but I think this is more fun. Agonising, but fun.

The contenders

I realised that mainstream sea kayaks that I had been dreaming of were out of my price range pretty quickly but here are a few of the ones I looked at:

• Mirage 580, the single version of a double I have spent a lot of time in, and really nice looking boats.
• Elliott Marauder & Reflection, but given the comfort issues I've had with my current one, plus a few build quality questions, I was in two minds on this manufacturer.
• Raider series by Roscoe Canoes in Brisbane, but given the distance from Canberra and similar prices I didn't look to much into these.

The average price of these kayaks was approx $3000 and I didn't have that much to spend so started looking for build-your-own kayak kits. While there was a mob in Wollongong, Cape Boat Works who do this kind of thing locally, I found that the majority of the companies making these kits were over in the States. In addition, there are two main companies who sell them in the US:

• Pygmy Boats, Inc., who designed the Coho my father built; and
• Chesapeake Light Craft (CLC), these guys seem to be the big distributor in this game and have an enormous array of designs shown on their website. I also saw one of their boats in the Hawkesbury Classic last year and had a bit of a chat with the fella on the way down the river in the wee hours, it was a nice looking rig.

Some have asked me if I'm apprehensive about biting off more than I can chew in building a boat from scratch, given my woodworking skills are pretty non-existent. I am, but the reassurance from the old man, plus more of the same from Pygmy saying that their boats have been built in living rooms, garages and apartments by people who have never attempted anything like this before, with stunning results. Also, given the whinge-fest that is the Internet, you'd think that if someone managed to bollocks one of these up they'd be on there complaining and giving negative reviews, but I haven't found it yet which has to say something.

I was initially drawn to CLC boats like a textbook Gen-Y moth to a flame as their website has an enormous amount of information on each design, and dial-like comparisons at the bottom of each design page showing how fast/slow, stable/tippy etc each design is. While the website of CLC was better, I got past this and the impression from the research I did was that Pygmy were in fact the market leader. I sent some emails which were responded to very quickly and with some excellent guidance on particular models to suit my size (I'm 6'4'' and 95kgs with size 12 feet), shipping quotes, and whether they could structure the shipments to stay under AUD$1000 to avoid having to pay GST and duty (they could, but the extra postage wouldn't make it worthwhile).

The Pygmy model I was initially looking at was the Osprey HP, as I liked the lines of the hull and deck better, and, let's not beat around the bush - it has a higher top speed! A few emails suggested I wouldn't fit comfortably with my legs, and couldn't amend the plans during construction to shift the bulkhead at my feet forward a few inches to allow extra footroom.
Next choice was the Coho. My Dad's model is a Coho (Standard) and this is what he paddles when training for the Hawkesbury, and what I used in 2009 for the event. Good news was that they also offer the Coho in a High Volume model, perfect! This has the same hull shape, but a deck raised an extra 1.5 inches of deck height for heffalumps like me. Word from Jim and Kelly at Pygmy also is that the difference between the Coho and Osprey HP is academic at best, and the Pygmy actually has a higher cruising speed, hence the Standard Coho being their highest selling model.

SOLD! I order the coho in the next few days once I sort out what accessories I need/want. This is getting really exciting.

In the beginning...

,After deciding a few weeks ago to buy a kit and build my own kayak, I found there were only a few online sites showing the whole process so now that I've decided to go ahead, I'll document it here with some juicy photos and a bit of a timeline.

As a background, I live in Canberra, Australia and have been kayaking on and off since I was at school 10 years ago. They had a pretty good outdoors program and I guess it stuck with me from there. Also, they compete in an annual event held outside Sydney called the Hawkesbury Canoe Classic - a 111km overnight marathon from Windsor to Brooklyn down the Hawkesbury river to raise funds for cancer research.

Last year in preparation for the race, I bought my first kayak at late notice and was quickly restricted by what I could get my hands on, a K1 flatwater kayak (Elliott Extreme) built by Elliott Kayaks north of Sydney. This was initially to do the race in but I quickly found myself in a boat too unstable to do the race and with a seat that sent my legs to sleep after 30 mins in the boat. It was ok to train in but I was able to get my hands on my Dad's Pygmy Coho to compete in.

Fast forward 12 months and I'm back in training for this year's race and the kayak bug has bitten again as the weather warms up. I'm doing the race this year in a double Mirage 730 sea kayak with my Dad but having to train again in the Elliott has made me yearn for a more comfortable boat more suited to open waters. And hence the search begins!

My initial criteria above (ie. comfortable and capable in choppy water) I found quickly limited by the price I could pay. Most fibreglass sea kayaks were in excess of AUD$2,500 and I couldn't justify spending this much coin on a new toy. My mind then quickly went back to the kayak my Dad built 3 years ago and a build-your-own kit quickly became an option for me. This, combined with an Australian Dollar/US Dollar exchange rate at all time highs and my project was beginning.