The Launch!!

After putting on the foot pedals, the boat is entirely functional. There is still plenty of work to do:

• Install hatches and bulkheads
• Sand, Sand, Sand and apply spar varnish for final finish
• Install deck rigging and hand toggles

But! It is entirely functional, so I could not wait to take it out and see how it would go. Would it track straight? Would it leak? Would some seam bust when under the first strain?

We put it on top of the Mini Cooper. Got to admit, that was pretty cool to me. Matthew helped, but super easy to do on my own. I figure the boat is about 40lbs. We drove over to Walsh Landing in Lake Austin, dropped off the kayak and parked.

Matthew graciously let me go first - I think it was his little payback for me doing most of the un-fun sanding work. I gingerly climbed in, worried that I might put my foot through the floor! Whoa! It's tippy! The cockpit opening is smaller than I expected too. If I was a big guy, it would be a tight fit. Then I start paddling. Whoa! This thing is fast!! That's the flip side of tippy... the boat is long and skinny, good for fast! And as I get used to it, I see it has good secondary stability. Meaning once you've leaned a little, you get a second solid support. The other side to long and skinny is that it doesn't turn very easily. For distances, it turns reasonably well, though in wide sweeps.

Paddling along was effortless, even with a slight wind in my face.

Matthew took a turn. The boat looks very cool as he paddles off. It will look even better once I get hatches and deck rigging installed. Matthew finds it very easy to paddle too, and the foot pedals have adjustable range that will fit both him and I.

Very Cool!! Very happy with the first ride. I haven't been in a "touring" kayak in a while, and I'm really looking forward to a LONG ride.

Catching up....

Haven't blogged in quite a while. Progress was less dramatic, and very busy. One thing we learned is that no matter how easy the step in the book looks, every step has plenty of opportunities for frustration. In the end, everything came together. The biggest frustration by far is working cleanly with the epoxy. It drips, sags, gets little air-pockets,etc. I spent hours and hours scraping and sanding drips and sags while the epoxy was a little green. Matthew was kind of disappointed because the finish (even with sags and drips) is very pretty, but not after scraping and sanding. I promise him that in the end, the final varnish will make it all beautiful again.

Steps to catch up to date:

Glueing the deck seams, and then glueing the deck to the hull. I was worried about this because the hull had flexed a bunch as weeks passed and the center of the hull was a couple of inches wider than the perfect fit, and this also meant the tips were 1/4 inch or so short. But, with gentle pressure and about 10 wires, we got the hull and deck to fit pretty well. Glueing the inside seams required building an extension pole with a syringe on the end, and then sort of blindly running glue in the seams. Did that, and taped the inside seams as far as can reach, and it all seems fine. Had to file the tips a little but in the end it looks great - no problems.

Glassing the deck. More sanding prep work, then draping fiberglass over the deck and wetting it out. I thought this would be harder to get the glass to lay well, but this actually was not bad. But, we put the epoxy on way to heavy. Looked great as we feathered it out, but next morning, huge drips and sags. This resulted in many hours of scraping green epoxy. Biggest advice I could ever give - when applying fiberglass, block out 3 or 4 days when you can do it, and put on THIN coats successively. It will look a lot better and save huge amounts of sanding.

Cockpit coaming. This was actually fairly fun to do. Kit comes with some prefab half-ovals, but since the deck flexes to fit the hull, you have to measure and cut, with bevelled edges to fit right. Glue on lower coaming pieces one night, and the top those with upper thin pieces another night. Glassing the coaming was difficult because it required overlapping pieces in several sections, but it all worked out.

Install seat. This required cutting some planks to glass and glue in as hip braces first. Sounds simple in the book, but trying to glass and fillet the back side of the braces (between the brace and the hull) was impossible. Did it totally blind and have little faith it is well constructed. But front went well and hopefully will hold it. Then holes are drilled in the hip braces, and the seat is bolted into the braces. A strap eye is also screwed under the coaming at the back. The book gave no clue how to drill a pilot hole when drill won't fit in the boat to do it. In the end drilled as best as could a hole at an angle and was able to attach it. The back of the seat is attached to the eye with some thin cable. Thermarest pad glued to the bottom. All good.

Mount foot pedals. Finally something that really was easy. Drill two holes on each side of boat (scary), seal the hole edges with a little epoxy, and then screw a runner on the inside of the hull that foot pedals attach to. All good.

Now all caught up.

Constructing the Deck

The deck comes in 4 top panels (2 in bow, 2 in stern), the 2 full length side panels, and a center piece. The panels are loosely wired together over the hull and temp frames in the hull, and then meticulously tightened together. I spent about 6 hours doing this today. To correctly fit the deck to the hull, I wired the two together at select spots. In between strapping tape was used to hold the deck flush to the hull. The process of getting the deck flush to the hull, and carefully adjusting each of the seams to be "fair" took a lot longer than I thought. But it's finally all ready, and I'm very happy with the result. The next step is to glue the seams of the deck together (but not to the hull), so the deck will stay in the shape that it is now fitted to.

Fill Coats

The first coat of epoxy glues the fiberglass to the hull, but additional coats are needed to fully wet out the fiberglass, and to get a thick enough layer of epoxy so that you can sand it down without sanding through the fiberglass and compromising the strength.

When adding fill coats, you can simply roll on new epoxy over the old, as long as the old epoxy hasn't cured fully. Once fully cured, it puts off a oily residue (amine blush) and gets so hard that new epoxy doesn't adhere well. So, the plan is to do 2 fill coats, sand out rough spots, and do one more fill coat, 3 days in a row.

Good plan, unfortunately life got in the way. Got through first 2 fill coats in 2 days, then had to wait 2 1/2 days. In our heat, the epoxy is pretty much cured after that long. So, after reading some stuff online, I decided to wet sand the hull to knock off the amine blush and get the rough spots. I did not do a great job with this. I didn't sand quite enough. Also, I worried that I needed to let the boat fully dry overnight in case the epoxy absorbed a little water, but then worried that would just result in more amine blush. I went ahead and did the last fill coat after a few hours, but worried about it. The epoxy did seem to streak a little, but might be my imagination. In the end, it seems it will all be OK because I'll have to sand one more time before putting on varnish. Wait a pain though, I thought the fill coat steps would be easy, but ended up causing a lot of grief.

Glassing the hull

Now that I've sanded the air bubbles out of the saturation coat, we're ready to put the fiberglass on and laminate that with epoxy. The fiberglass comes in a roll about 6 ft wide and 30 ft long. It's slippery as hell to handle. It's easy to spread over the hull, but after cutting it off the end, it's a pain to try to fold up

remainder for later steps. It's a little tricky on the bow and stern to cut the cloth, and double it over the ends so that it lays flat. Spreading the epoxy is fairly easy and the cloth spreads well until we get to the ends. Then it's a little work to get the ends done without it bunching up. We had good success with the bow, but the stern had a little pucker we'll have to cut out. But that's not a problem because we have to lay a reinforcing strip over the keel in the next step and it will completely clean up the pucker.

Per instructions, I take a plastic squeegee to press the epoxied glass down and press out the excess. I don't get much excess, maybe we did a good job with the roller.

Now the blog is caught up with our progress.

Saturation Coat

The next step is to coat the entire hull with epoxy. This saturation coat soaks in and seals the wood. This is really cool because you finally get to see what the wood will look like when finished. All those glue runs and sanding bare spots disappear. Once again though, I learn to pay attention to the minor instructions. I had planned to do it Friday night, but realized I had foam roller pads - but not the rollers. So, I had to get a roller Saturday morning and we did the coat then. This was actually a very easy. Matthew said it was the most fun yet. He's not big on sanding - yeah, he's figured out that's a pain. But sanding will more than anything determine how good the boat looks when done. Anyway... I was saying I didn't pay attention to instructions. The manual mentioned to not do the saturation coat when the temperature will be rising because the wood will out-gas as temp rises, and the air will get trapped in the drying epoxy. Yes, it's true. The saturation coat that went on perfectly smooth ended up feeling like sandpaper the next day because of a million little air bubbles. You can't see it in the picture, but it's there. I can either ignore it, or spend another few hours sanding. I sand. But the wood looks great.

Remove Stitches and Cleanup Seams

Now the seams are all glued together. We pull out the stitches. Some people comment this is hard because they get glued to the boat, but we didn't have much trouble. Unfortunately, there are lots of gaps in the seam glue where the stitches were, so we go through the seam fills a few more times. Each time, we are wiping up drips and trying to keep it clean, while at the same time filling the seams with a rounded edge. So far, this is the part that I was most disappointed with our results. Can't ever seem to get the edges as rounded as Pygmy shows in the pictures. But, finally, I think I've got it close enough. We sand all the seams, and round the edges with sandpaper and file, and finally we're done with this part.

You can see how the seam glue dripped out and had to be wiped up. Really not a problem though, as long as its sanded smooth, those wiped up areas will disappear completely once the rest of the hull is coated with epoxy

The observant will note my hi-tech saw horses. We have some small craft chairs that have gabled tops on the backs of the chairs. They can be positioned in a way that seems to support the boat well enough. The more industrious build some fancy sawhorse modifications. I did build the worktable in the background, but felt like I could get away with the chairs for sawhorses. In truth, we probably should have been more careful in securing the boat while working on it. Pulling on the side panels made them a little wider than they are supposed to be, but I think it will be OK when pulled to the deck later.

Glueing Seams

Now that the boat is fully stitched, as best as we can do it, we mix up a small batch of epoxy, pour it into a dental syringe, and then lay a thin bead of glue into all the seams we stitched together.

This is the point of no return, meaning that once you glue the panels, the boat shape is set. If you don't have it straight, you're screwed. All the fiddling with the stitches seems to have paid off - the keel seems perfectly straight; the top of the deck seems level; no twist as far as I can tell. Should track straight.

Still, glueing the seams was far harder for us than it should have been. The problem we had was that it was a mess. The glue easily ran out of the seams and down the sides of the boat, and we just weren't practiced with the process. We did a lot of wiping up drips, and going back and refilling in seams that didn't want to fill in. Once this dries, we mix another batch of epoxy that has some wood flour mixed in to thicken it. This is used to make a rounded edge over the seams. Again, very messy, we never really got the hang of this.

Here is confession 1 - all the pictures this far are from the Pygmy building instructions. I didn't think about taking pictures up to this point, but wanted to show what the process looked like. All the pictures after this will be from our own boat. The picture here is what the bead of epoxy along the seams is supposed to look like.

Stitch and Glue

These boats are assembled by "stitching" the panels together with wire, to form the basic shape, and then glueing the panels together at the seams. The first step is to drill a little hole, every 6 inches for most of the length, and every 2 inches at the ends of each panel. This is the first step where precision is important, if you don't drill the holes in alignment, then the panels will not line up exactly when you pull the stitches tight. The panels are expected to be aligned to at least within 1/16th of an inch over the entire 14 ft. In addition, along the stitch seams, the edges need to be exactly even. There was a lot of fiddling with this - loosening stitches, tugging a panel 1/16 inch this way, pushing this edge out ever so slightly, re-tightening, over and over. I was never fully satisfied, but finally gave in when I couldn't seem to "fix" one thing without moving another. And it is amazing, because these flat panels all come together with the stitches to form a boat.

The First Step

The kit comes with panels that are assembled to make the boat. The panels come in half-lengths, meaning that each panel has to be glued to another at the butt ends to make one panel that will span the length of the boat. This is the first time to use the epoxy and fiberglass tape provided with the kit. It comes in two parts - the epoxy in one jug, and the hardener in another jug. They have to be mixed in exactly a 2/1 ratio or it won't dry. I don't know if it's by design, but one nice thing about the entire building process is you get to try many of the "first time" steps in a easy to recover part. For instance, I screwed up and mixed a 2/2 ratio when glueing one of the panels together - it's easier than you think to screw that up. It doesn't dry. The only resolution is to scrape off the gummy residue, and wipe it down with acetone to get back to bare wood. This wasn't so hard on just one butt end of a panel. It would be a real bummer to screw that up when putting epoxy on the whole boat. Another thing we learned - they provide mylar to put under the pieces being glued so you don't glue the wood to something you don't mean to. But the instructions said you could also use wax paper. Didn't work for us - had to sand a bunch of glued on wax paper. But, now we've learned a few things and have our panels glued together into 14 ft lengths.

The Kit Arrives

We purchased the Artic Tern 14. This seemed like a good choice for several reasons - it's small enough that Matthew can handle it now, but big enough that either Alison or I can use it for scooting around Town Lake. The bigger kayaks would be great if we were going on long trips, packing lot's of gear, but this will be great for our use. It also is one of the less expensive ones. These aren't cheap - the basic boat, with a few options ran about $750. I've already purchased another $250 worth of "stuff" - some tools I needed include a cabinet scraper, and an orbital sander. I'll need them for something else, right? All the other little stuff adds up too, paint brushes, clamps, etc.

The Beginning

At the beginning of the summer of 2009, I wanted to think of a project for Matthew and me. When he was a littler kid, we had a ton of fun building Lego projects. In fact we still have a small scale model "hemi" engine kit, that we never started. But I wanted something else. I remembered way back in boy scouts, building a canoe. It was a really cool project. So I checked out some boat building kits, and after a little research settled on the Pygmy boat kit. They have several models of sit in kayaks. These are more suited for colder temps - down south we all have sit on top kayaks. But, checking out the building process, and the finished products, I was really impressed with the quality of the boats, both in functionality and looks.

I thought this kind of project would be a great experience too. It involves lots of planning - reading instructions and thinking through the construction process; attention to detail - a small mistake can cause big problems, like a boat that doesn't go straight; and deferred gratification - it takes a long time to do this. The process only takes about 75 hours or so, but adding in wait time for epoxy drying, and busy schedules, we'll be lucky to finish in about 5 months.

I wanted to share pictures with some friends and family, and decided (about a 1/3 way through) that a good way to do this is with a blog that I can add comments and pictures.

Since we did a bunch of steps before I thought of the blog, there will be 5 or 6 posts that will catch up to where we are now.

Randy