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.

Finally finished the joins on the hull.

Tonight I finally finished the trimming and filing back of the epoxy and glass at the joins of the strips. Here's a hot tip (Number 5 if I remember correctly) for you - if you're 6'3 and building one of these, get a work bench higher than your average trestle table. Bending over for even half an hour to do this work makes you feel a little worse for wear in the spine. The dog definitely appreciates the attention while I'm re-sorting my vertebrae though.

I've still got the other sides of the joins to epoxy for the deck, but I'll go through the instructions to see if I can get this stage done around the other stages of construction or if it's better off biting the bullet and doing it all now. I've got a that niggling feeling in the back of my mind that I should follow the instructions word for word because the fellow who wrote them obviously knows what he's doing, but another little voice that says 'go on, get things going!' I really want to start seeing a hull take shape. Insert saying or quip about patience being a virtue or something.

The only reason not to that I can think of now is that there may not be room to finish the deck joins once the hull is sitting on the workbench and taking up all the room. That's it.

No more rain in the last few days to speak of, but the month before that was crazy, I don't think I've seen so much water fall out of the sky before. Ever. Heading away for 2 weeks for a Christmas/New Year Break on Friday, I might get a little more done before Friday but probably won't get around to writing about it.

Strips are finished

I completed the final joint reinforcement on the last four strips on the weekend. Now all I need to do before moving to the next construction stage is cut and file the overhanging fibreglass tape as I mentioned on the previous post. While this will take a while, I can get into them without having to wait for epoxy to dry as I have had to in the past, so a few afternoons after work this week should see me getting this done. The final eight joins being glued are below, weighed down with bricks to ensure a good join.

One thing I have noticed is that with the higher overnight temperatures (approx 8-9 degrees C) are helping the epoxy to cure a lot quicker. Most of my work is being done at night and then left for the next day to completely set. I ordered the slow setting epoxy due to the coming summer, and when I first began was having trouble getting it to cure properly. Now that we're not having cold nights and the daytime temps are hovering at around 26-28 degrees Celsius all the work has been fully cured by the next night.

The next step once I cut off the remaining glass tape is to drill the holes in the strips for the wire stitches to go through. I'm not sure how long this will take, but on the upside it'll mean I can get some good use from the sweet Makita cordless drill my father in law gave me as a wedding present. I also find that I've been using my dust/fume mask a lot with the sanding back and filing of the epoxy as the dust is very fine and probably isn't very good for me. It makes me look like some kind of biological soldier and it freaks the dog out. At least when I'm wearing it he doesn't drop his grotty slobbery tennis ball on my feet while I'm trying to work.

I'm looking forward to the next stage. I want to see a hull start to take shape dammit!

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.

Completion of the panel joining - Part A

In the week after the Hawkesbury I didn't get much done, catching up on sleep was a little higher on the list of priorities, but got back into building the Coho again this weekend.

So I've finished joining all the panel parts on the inside of the hull and now have the hull strips in the required number of pieces. Now all I need to do to finish up this stage of the construction is to epoxy in another strip of fibreglass tape to the other side of the join to strengthen it further. Apparently with this second piece of fibreglass in place, the joins will actually be stronger than the surrounding wood.

With less fiddling around now that the joins are now held firm, reinforcing the other side is much quicker as you don't have to be so careful not to bump them during the setting of the epoxy, plus, I can glass the whole length of a panel rather than one join, wait for it to cure, then the other join (there are 2 joins per panel) so this part should be easier, plus I've got a bit of a system going and I'm a little more confident in using the fibreglass.

I also successfully sanded out the mill stamp that I'd epoxied over previously. I used some coarse grit sandpaper to get through the epoxy, and once it was gone the stamp came out of the wood quite quickly. After this, the epoxy back onto the wood just looked normal, no trace the stamp was ever there or that I'd taken some extra wood off!

I'm also having better success with the curing time of the epoxy now that the temperatures outside are now a little warmer. Joins made at night are now ready to be sanded and moved around the next night after a day to cure.

Not so bad after all

I asked Jim @ Pygmy if there was any way to sand the stamps out that I had epoxied in the other night. Turns out that in another bout of not reading the instructions properly I had missed the bit that says to sand back the reverse of the panels you have now joined together and epoxy & fibreglass in a similar fashion (ie. the strip of epoxy and 'glass over the join will be on both sides). I've got to sand back to bare wood anyway, so it's just a matter of doing a bit extra and knocking off the stamp.

Got a few more panels done last night, but won't get any done tonight because of RFS Wednesday night training. Goddam it, my life keeps interfering with getting my project finished! I still reckon I'll be on track to finish the first lot of joins by the weekend to allow them to cure for a few days.

I anticipate that doing the reinforcing joins on the other sides of the panels won't be so fiddly and slow as the panels will already be joined and hence not to susceptible to being bumped.

Success... of sorts

On getting home yesterday afternoon I inspected the previous day's work to see how my first lot of panel-joining went.  All of the joins were bonded strongly enough to remove the weights, though some were still a little tacky and needed another day or so to finish fully curing. As is stands, I think I've joined together about 40% of the pieces now, and managed to glue another 4 together last night, so I think I'm sitting at a little over 50% completion for this stage of the construction. With a few warmer days on the way I should be able to get the rest of the joins finished by Friday and then they can fully cure while I'm away at the Hawkesbury on the weekend.

The lessons keep on coming however. In the manual it instructs to look over the wood panels to check for stamps on the timber put there by the mill, plus any stickers, marks etc. I did this previously when setting up and checking off the panels, but looks like I either did it in the dark or with my eyes closed, as on turning them over to check the underside of the joins that were among the first I set, I found these:

I had successfully epoxied over two mill stamps with expert precision. I figure I will possibly be able to sand through the epoxy once it's fully cured and remove them. The reason I didn't see them is that they were on the other side of the joins I was doing, and hence on the outside of the boat. If they were on the inside I don't think I would really care too much, as they'd work like an identifying mark of sorts, but I don't think I want them on the outside of the hull. After much colourful language and profanity, I also found two other stamps that I'd previously missed, and sanded them off. To quote George W. Bush "fool me once, shame on you, but... ahhh... fool me twice... you can't get fooled again".

Here's how sneaky they can be, this one was right on the join, and I wouldn't have seen it unless I was looking for them on the joins. Hence, here's Tip #3 on kayak building from the book of Coho: Check both sides of the joins before you let epoxy anywhere near them. It's like letting a dog run around unsupervised near setting cement - that mess is gonna be there for a while unless you catch it before it happens.

I guess if I have to leave them there it'll bring life to the notion that this boat will be personalised and I'll know each and every piece of it. In the scheme of things it probably won't be that visible, but it's annoying nonetheless.

Structurally, the joins are fine, hence the title of this post. And in that respect things are coming along swimmingly. I'm getting more confident using the epoxy, and starting to get a picture of the hull as it all comes together. If there was a Masterchef for kayaks, I reckon I'd still be in the competition. The taste is there, it's just that the presentation is lacking. Plus, Matt Preston is a jerk and I wouldn't take any of his crap.

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!