Kayak Build, Part 1

Over the Christmas holidays Little J and I ordered some plans to build him a kayak for the summer. We opted for a Wood Duck 10 by CLC, which would be big enough for him to use for a few years.

With a few sheets of 4mm okoume plywood ordered J was ready to go. We laid out the sheets and started to trace the plans onto the boards.

It started well, but after about 30 minutes of tracing he decided this was too much work and wanted to pack it in for the day.




It was at that point I realized this was going to be a lonnnnnng project.

With the boards laid out and the plans traced on, we scarfed and epoxied the sheets together making one huge 4x16 sheet of plywood to cut the long 10 or 11' panels from.

Finally, after what Little J seemed to feel was forever we set to cutting the shapes out. It took awhile before getting into the grove of it, but we found that the best way was to grind my jigsaw blade down to 1" and then cut the boards right on top of a 1" piece of Building Styrofoam. This supported the bottom and let me kneel down onto the board as I cut it, which gave a better cut. Unfortunately I didn't figure this out until I had cut half of the patterns out so it made for some extra sanding and spokeshave shaping for the pieces I did first.

With the pieces cut Little J set to work as the "copper cutter"... his job was to cut me 200 pieces of 3" 20ga copper wire. He found this job was much more enjoyable once he fastened a jig together with 3" markings on it and set down in front of the TV to do the cutting. Once he had enough we started to wire the kayak together. This is the bottom hull:


This is also the point where I discovered the book/manual that came with the plans really sucked. Getting the tips together and stitched in tight was a real struggle and I ended up spraying the tips with water to soften them up, all while getting a helper to hold them in place while I twisted the copper together. I think it took longer to join the bow and stern than it did to stitch the rest of the hull together....



We started the build in a garage, which isn't heated, so after a day of cutting and stitching the hull together both Little J and I opted to build the deck by the wood fire. Mom wasn't to happy we were doing it in her living room. Once built, Little J put on his best paddling pose:



Next up: Tacking the kayak together!


Pro tips for next time:

For the long curved lines next time I would drop a few points in with 1" finish nails, then take a long thin piece of flexible plywood (1/4" thick x 1" wide) and bend it to the curve on the points to trace out the line.

To cut the panels out, cut on top of a styrofoam panel with a shortened blade on a jigsaw. More control and less tearout!

A few of the curves, like the hatch cutouts, need to have 2 or 3 pieces that are cut exactly the same to line up together. I would cut one, then trace the one I cut before cutting the next one. I ran into some problems where I cut 1 part but didn't trace perfect (and compounded this by not cutting perfect) so the mating part didn't mate so well. I can fill the gap with epoxy filler, but it just creates more work.

Building a kayak

I got bored so started to build a kayak with Little J.



The main thing I've learned so far is building a kayak with an 8 year old will take 3x as long as on my own.

Details to come...

2010 in review.

I can't believe I only posted 11 times in 2010. That's 10% of what I peaked at in 2006. Here was the summary of my year:

January to June: Pretty much a blur.... kept on pace to fly 100,000 miles.

July: Discovered that I promised LP-ette that I would build a deck with railings for her by end of the summer. Spend most of my evening sanding, routing and staining 4x4 fir to make railings.

August: A month on Hornby Island. (And I only had to work 2 weeks of my vacation!). My motto: Don't bug me when I'm on holiday. Scotch was drunk. Treeforts were built. Stars were watched. Here's a time-lapse shot I took over Lasqueti Island.

September: Hand mixed the 18 bags of cement with colorant that I bought in July and formed a cobblestone path. It looks cool, but man, what was I thinking?!?

October: Don't remember what happened, except I don't think spend much of it in Canada or a timezone that was amendable to my body.

November: Sleeping to recover from the previous month. I do remember that.

December: 2 weeks of craziness of finishing year end goals and then 2 weeks of researching a kayak build to start in the new year (more to come on that later).

And to top it all off, my "to read" bookshelf grew by about 15 books, instead of being reduced. I've got alot to catch-up on in 2011....

Noetic Revalations

I feel crampy.

Brain cramps to be specific.

Like the kind you feel right after you've crammed for an exam, but then realize you memorized a pile of useless facts, only to be given a multiple choice basic math quiz. Only I don't feel like doing any math.

Why all crampy, you ask? 2009 and 2010 (to date) has been a crampy year all around for many reasons:

• Way too much travel. Hitting Air Canada's Elite Gold Status in under 3 months sounds fun until your body has to actually do it (and all in coach)... I did a quick calculation and I have travelled over 100,000 miles in the past 8 months. That is 4x around the world. India, Indonesia, France, Nashville, Toronto, Montreal...




• Too much renovations. I am still working on the inside finish work of this enternal renovation and yes, the darned deck. Railings? Who needs railings?!? Apparently I do. And a cement stone path as well.




• Not enough riding. I picked up a new Trek Madone in the summer and have well under 200km on it. Why? See my "Too much" list.




• Not near enough writing: 21 blog posts in 2009. What was up with that? Yes I had probably 200+ Facebook or Twitter updates, but that doesn't count.

So here's what I tried:

• I tried replacing the crampy feeling with high quality scotch, but the hangover was a wicked 2 days of blurriness.




• I tried replacing the crampy feeling with Facebook status updates. All I got was a bunch of Farmville requests in return.




• I tried reading all of Reddit, but did it all and then saw the repeats on Digg the next day.




• I tried increasing my noetic stimulation by broadening my Twitter feeds, but realized all I received in return was a plethora of data which required manual extrapolation into meaningful informaiton .

So I have to bump my wring again. My notebook is out, and in the past few month many scribbles have been taken but none crafted into prose.

A prime example of some note-pad scribbles from this past year:

Toronto:
everyone wears a scarf - fashion over coldness.
couldn't understand why I wore shorts
women are better looking. What? Well, better dressed. I think Little Italy had something to do with it.
Bikers - crazier, no helmets. I aspire.
Less panhandelers more hot-dog stands. Standing at Bloor & Younge gave me 4 choices within 100 feet. Nice

For inspiration I have stocked up my bookshelf with some 2009 Giller Prize nominees:

• Kim Echlin for her novel THE DISAPPEARED
• Annabel Lyon for her novel THE GOLDEN MEAN
• Anne Michaels for her novel THE WINTER VAULT

So the table is set and I will read with veracity...and hopefully let the cramps be gone!

Who says I can't code?

After an hour of recoding in HTML, I managed to re-insert the blogger comments field.

Comments are back up!

LP

A brief update...

Yes, it has been awhile since I posted...

Since March I think I only have been home for about 14 days total:

...flew back from India, slept for a few days, traveled to Nashville, then Toronto, back to Victoria - where I finally had a weekend at home so I promptly packed and left for Hornby - returned home, but left for Vancovuer, then repacked and went to France. Fortunately I departed out Europe the morning of the European airspace shutdown, otherwise I would still be there. Arrived home, and after 2 days the wanderlust had already kicked in so I traded my dress clothes for comfort and then left again for Hornby, where I was forced to relax (in the pouring rain) with 2 children (and a dog!) in a small enclosed trailer.... but arriving home seems to have triggered my body to rebel and it won't make it out of bed this week... I think it is a combination of the flu, a cold, travel shots and swollen tonsils. I am supposed to leave for Asia in 3 days, so if I don't get better it looks like I will be grounded.

Maybe that is a good thing...

On the flip side I've got a new camera that is taking some good pictures of my travels. Here is Vancouver from the air, as I flew into Downtown.


Now I think I'll go watch Ferris Bueller's Day Off...

LP.

PS: In case you're wondering Haloscan totally screwed up the comments field and I need to recode the blog to make it happen.

A colored set

Jordan was so excited today when we stopped at the store to pickup some new deck chairs for the house.

"Can I pick the colors?" is all I heard.... I agreed and after much deliberation about what mom would like the best, this is what he picked for me to bring home:




If his mom is impressed as much as he is excited, this is going to be awesome.

Put those on your hummock and smoke it....