The kayak hulls are finally closed up... the last strips [at least on the hulls] are in! Seemed to be a mammoth effort to get hose last ones in. A challenge to your best clamping skills... masking tape, hot glue, bent strips holding down from the ceiling, g-clamps, f-clamps... anything goes!

 

 

Now what? There is a lot of sanding and filling to do still before we can add the first layer of fiber-glass. But before we can do any of that we have to order the resin and the glass!

Yeah, I know... its about time!

Here is the latest update... we've been pretty slow over the summer. Lots of excuses, not many strips applied! Notice that the snow-blower is back in the garage... if we'd made progress during the summer you'd have seen the lawn-mower... snow is gently falling outside. As soon as i've put this entry up i'm heading out to put another strip on!

Beginning to get close to closing up the hull. Notice that the color schemes are almost the reverse of each other. Leslie's has a lot of northern white cedar on the underside whereas mine has more red cedar. I have used white at the shearline and for a pencil line accent.

 

A few more strips to add followed by some sanding. Should be closed up in the next couple of weeks.

Here you see the use of many clamps, tape, straps, stapled strips... anything goes! To keep strips in place while the glue dries is the aim.

Planing and Forming

We spent a day last weekend cleaning up the forms and getting all of the little bits together for mounting the forms/stations to the strongback. We also had to mark accurate center-lines on everything... it all takes time.

I got all of mine set-up and we got a few of Leslies done. It is kinda nice to have them setup because I can see the final shape of the kayak now, and like what I see. For those who are actually awake at this point, the forms are meant to be upside down... you build the hull first and then the deck.

 One 'warm' [above freezing, just!] evening I decided to do the planing of the cedar. It took me a couple of hours to get everything down to 3/4 thick. This is just the Atlantic 'white' cedar... you can see some variation in color from white to yellow to pinkish. I guess i'd hoped for a little more uniformity but it is what it is...

 And I generated a little sawdust!

A little clean-up to do yet... did I mention that I really hate the smell of cedar! I made a few cigar humidors out of spanish cedar last year and have not been able to stand the smell since.

Until the next update... John

Our days are lumbered!

100 board feet of Atlantic white cedar and 20 board feet of Western Red cedar.
Picked up from Goose Bay Sawmill and Lumber in Chichester, NH today... here it is on the truck...

First impressions... 20' is really long... that 18' kayak is going to be long too! We are thinking at this stage that we have way too much cedar for the 2 kayaks... there may be enough left over to build another! We''ll see whether there is enough lumber and/or incentive after finishing the first 2!

There is a lot of prep work to do before we actually get down to building... in the last couple of weeks we have marked out, cut and sanded forms. Made blocks etc to mount them to the strongbacks and I am currently setting up an adjustable router table that will take 2 routers so that we can cut the bead and cove at the same time! This is close to finished but I got bogged down in a storage project for the machine shop. That involved a new router table stand and a new drill press stand, both with plenty of drawers in to get stuff out of the way.

 For those, not in the know, here is a picture of the end of a bundle of 55 bead and cove cedar strips to be used in kayak/canoe construction. Each of those strips is 1/4" thick by 3/4" wide and somewhere between 12' and 20' long! This is how we could have purchased ours but at around $0.55 per foot it comes in at around $700 per kayak... we did both for that kind of price. But the downside is we are going to have to spend 2 or 3 days prepping our wood to get them into this state... and of course, I already had the table saw, 2 routers, router bits, planer etc... otherwise you could easily blow that $700 saving on tools... easily!

Excitement is mounting... chomping at the bit to get started on stripping but we still have at least a day, or two, of cutting strips and routing cove and beads on the edges.

John

Getting started...

There is prep work to do... a lot of prep work before you can really start to build.
First we made some saw horses you could park my truck on. They are going to be subject to some abuse over the course of the build process so need to be pretty rigid. They also need to be convertible for slings when the hull has been stripped and it is time for the deck stripping. We worked as a team running 8 of them off of our production line made from plywood and 2x6 scraps mostly from our house repairs last month.

Then came the strong-backs. A rigid box made from construction grade plywood about 6" square, mine 18' 6" long, Leslie's 16' long. The 2 of us sliced 6" strips of 1/2" ply, stapled them into box sections and then spliced them together to give us the required lengths.

One of the things these photos really don't show is the size of these things... 18' 6" pretty much fills the length of the garage...

You can also see from these photos that we have our stations/forms ready to go... Leslie wants to make alterations to hers so there may be a little more work involved for her yet.

What's next? We need to mount the forms/stations on the strong-back at the required spacing and heights. That will take a day or so for the 2 set-up and will need both of us working together I think.

We need to go get our cedar. I ordered some from a localish saw mill and should be able to pick it up next weekend. We'll then need to cut it into 1/4" and 3/16" thick strips which will be a big job... pushing 20' lengths of cedar through the table saw will not be fun. Then the 1/4" strips will be bead and cove cut on the router so that they 'lock' together. I need to build the router set-up for that yet so that we can feed the strips through and cut the profile in each edge with 1 pass... i have the 2 routers that will be needed for that, just need to build some simple mini router tables with feather boards etc to keep things running smoothly. According to our designer it is worth spending the time to get these set-up correctly, the strips really do need to be precision cut for them to work correctly.
- JVK

In the beginning...

So we've had plans to build this for a while now. It was probably 2 years ago that we trekked up to Maine in some really miserable weather to pay Laughing Loon and Rob Macks a visit. To be honest, I wasn't blown away by his designs initially, it was Leslie who decided that the Georgian Bay fitted her needs. But I heard and liked what he said about the design and the potential for modifications. We talked about those mods and what the implications of them would be and I too was convinced that the design would be right for me.

From laughingloon.com

 Rob Macks spent a good couple of hours talking to us about the build process, showing us around his shop and demonstrating some of the basic techniques. All for 1 set of plans and a second license to build for me... I have to say I thought he was very generous with both his time and his knowledge.

 It had always been my intention to get started on this project that year... but life kinda got in the way... actually I think it may have been the master bath refit plus some jewellery box stuff etc...

3rd January 2012... we are back on the project... we've gone over the plans again. Looked at our notes on the scaling process and begun to look for cedar suppliers. It is our intention right now to cut and mill our own strips. Both of us would like to use a predominance of Northern white cedar and use western red for accents. Of course the only problem with this is that the northern white only seems to be available up to 10' or 12' lengths, the western red seems to be available up to more than 20' in length. But if everyone else has been using the northern white in shorter lengths and scarfing it together then you must be able to do it pretty well and nearly invisibly since I have never noticed it on the strip built kayaks and canoes that I have seen. So maybe the whole issue is moot...

We need to build strong-backs first and also some saw horses to put them on while we build. If we are going to mill everything ourselves then we will also need to make up some out-feed supports too. I am thinking that the saw horses may be able to double up for that use.

Time for some thought on cosmetic personalization of the design too, so that we know how much of the various woods we will require. I'll put up some sketches when we have that...

Our old website with the construction of our sailboat, a Merlin Rocket, is here still:

http://home.comcast.net/~jvpkeeling/

JVK