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!

Slow going...

A combination of more stuff on the go with Christmas parties etc coming into season, combined with a stage of construction that doesn't really lend much to progress photos has meant I haven't posted anything in a while. I feel as though tonight I can finalise the rest of the joins on the other sides of the strips, so in the next couple of weeks we should start to see some sort of a hull beginning to take shape!

To give you a low-down on what I have been doing, each join I have previously made has a strip of now hardened fibreglass soaked into it which needs to be trimmed, and then the excess epoxy filed back with a wood file so that the resulting joined strip is no wider than the rest of the strip. You can see what I'm talking about below. (Tip # 4: Make sure when using a razor blade to cut off the hardened fibreglass you have something to stop the blade slipping right through the glass and slicing your hand open. I almost did this a few times before putting a block of wood under the strip and holding my hand behind it which stops you making prosciutto of your fingers).

 Each join has to be filed back before I can do the other side, so with about 40 to do it can be time consuming, but still not particularly tedious. Definitely helps if you have one of these:

It's a car stereo I wired up to a car battery and set into a pretty roughly knocked up hardwood box. The solar panel on top will charge it by trickle feed when the sun comes out, and it pumps out some pretty sweet tunes. Summer here I come! Definitely makes the hours spent in the shed much more fun. Nothing says 'I'm a man and this is my shed' like some Johnny Cash pumping to the sound of power tools!

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.

Hawkesbury wrapup

In what was an extraordinary Hawkesbury, we started with warnings of bad weather, which were then cancelled only to then have the bad weather come in when we were all at our most vulnerable. 30km/h + headwinds, a fast incoming tide, rain and some pretty heavy 2-3 foot chop meant the last 10km took an eternity. We couldn't stop for a break as it meant we'd end up going backwards and/or end up capsizing, and with driving rain coming at our faces, it was generally an unpleasant place to be.

A stop at Wisemans to have some strapping put on my hands due to blisters, plus troubles with my right wrist were troubles I'd not encountered before, and slowed us down a little, but it was a reasonably pleasant night up until the weather doing what it did.

At one stage we got caught up in a barbed wire fence which got interesting. We were hugging the bank in the incoming tide, when we dodged a star picket which happened to have a trailing string of barbed wire underwater attached to another star picket. We were stuck fast as the wire got lodged in the rudder system and sat the for a good 5 mins trying to get free. Another paddler stopped to help but couldn't budge us, and we ended up being helped by a nice fella and his mates who were having a few beers up the river a little and waded into the thigh deep water in the darkness to lift us off. Thanks mystery man!

We made it in a time of 14 hours 39 mins, which was slower than we'd hoped, but still pretty good considering the circumstances.

Eventually the race committee made the decision to cancel the race for everyone who hadn't made it past the Spencer's checkpoint, which was both good and bad. The conditions were really ordinary, the worst I've seen yet, but it would have been such a shame to have been pulled out after so much work to get to Spencer's.

Replacement materials arrive

A nice surprise arrived yesterday, a package via courier with the replacement materials Pygmy sent me to make up for the stuff ruined by the leaking epoxy. Included were:

1. New heavy fibreglass tape;
2. Another sheet of fibreglass cloth (both this and the tape above has absorbed most of the spill);
3. More syringes, vinyl gloves, stirring sticks and light fibreglass tape;
4. Another copy of the Coho Manual and The Epoxy Book;
5. A sheet of Mylar (clear vinyl plastic) which had been discarded by FedEx;
6. Another 1 quart of resin (part A) and 0.5 quarts of hardener (part B) to replace that lost in transit. To say it was lost is perhaps an embellishment. I still had it, but unfortunately it was going to be a bit tricky to put back on the kayak where and when I needed it given it was nicely distributed throughout the box;
7. An empty resin bottle so I could use the hand pump more easily. I have been using an apple juice bottle which is just doing the job, but this will make it easier when I'm using more resin in the latter stages on construction.

Again, massive thanks to the guys @ Pygmy for all their help, it only took an extra 5 days to get all this all from the States to Australia. Pretty impressive I reckon.

Hawkesbury Classic Countdown - It's gonna be a wet one!

 mSo the Hawkesbury Classic is on this Saturday 23rd of October. Over the next 2 days I'll be using this as an excuse to eat a ton of food, mainly carbs (he says with a cheese and bacon roll in his hand) and generally being a layabout while building up my energy stocks.

According to the Bureau of Meteorology forecast for the weekend, they've gone from yesterday's forecast for the weekend of a few showers, to thunderstorms from midday and 35km/h winds.At least at with a top of 29 degrees it won't be too cold until the sun goes down but by the sound of it once that happens it's going to be a pretty ordinary night on the water. On the bright side, we might get a bit of flow in the river that could reduce the impact of an incoming tide? Wishful thinking perhaps...

 In terms of preparation it's meant I've had to change from preparing for the cold to preparing for being wet all night. While it's important to have a beanie (woolen) of some sort to stop the loss of heat through your head, now it's also going to be important to somehow keep my head dry too. Wool is the order of the day, because it still retains warmth when wet so I've got a few old woolen jumpers and thermal too, for the midnight 'till dawn shift.

Because of the cloud there's not going to be much moonlight, so I've also got a head torch so we can minimise the number of times we end up in trees or reeds by wandering too close to the bank. I say minimise, because this always happens at least once or twice regardless of how much you look for them.

I've also got my standard compulsory emergency gear - a space blanket, compass, small torch, whistle etc and a few disposable ponchos. PFD's get tested on the day, and mine is a handy type with a few pockets on the front to stash some nibbles and a few essentials like painkillers and Vaseline for my hands. I've gone for the sans-gloves option this year. I'll have them with me in case I get blisters, but will coat my hands in Vaso to stop them getting too waterlogged during the night.

In terms of food for the night, we'll fed soup and pasta during the night, but I also have a stash of bananas, glucose lollies, muesli bars, nuts and a few energy bars for the latter stages/early morning. I've been experimenting with Coca Cola during training, and while I know you're supposed to avoid caffeinated drinks as they are a diuretic I think one small can's sugar hit can should help push me through the "wee" hours (yep, that's a diuretic joke, who would have thought I'd manage it?) where I have struggled in the past.

My tendency to vomit about two hours into the race on the same corner is expected to continue, and so I'll limit what I eat in the two or so hours before the race to avoid having too many things come back up. I can have a few bits of ready to go once my body has had it's little tantrum so I don't lose too much energy.

Lastly, if anyone reading this is feeling particularly generous, feel free to sponsor me for the race. All donations over $2 are tax deductible and proceeds go directly to the Arrow Bone Marrow Foundation at St Vincent's Hospital to do their top notch research into Leukemia and other blood cancers & disorders such as Lymphoma and Myeloma. This is something particularly close to my heart as I was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins's Diffuse large B-Cell Lymphoma in 1999 when I was 16. I'm sound as a pound now after a fair whack of chemo, but I know personally how generally sh*thouse these diseases are. Get in there and throw 'em some coin!

Edit: We're looking for a time under 13 hours, which is reasonable. Last time I did this race in a double it took us 12 hrs 50 mins, so beating that time is the target. Last year was just over 15 hours solo.