The decks are beginning to take shape. In the woodworking world they always say that you can never have too many clamps... in the boat building world we say that you never have enough clamps!

 Part of what increases the complexity of this process are the patterns we are trying to achieve. Leslie has lots of common sense so her pattern is a lot more simple than mine... she intends to embellish with a little applique. All mine is in the inlay look... the 'inlay' stripes are made up of 5 pieces of wood a dark piece of 1/4" wide cedar in the middle with a strip of 1/8" white cedar either side and a piece of dyed black maple veneer, 1/40" thic on the outside of that. It is used to separate the different patches on my pattern. It is more distinct in the later pictures.

And then we added some fiber glass...

And then we begin the coaming.

Glass Fiber - the first piece

It was a cold weekend... not as cold as it had been... just as well, we need to get the garage up to 85F. So we begged, borrowed and borrowed some electric heaters... plus the base board heating and a propane heater to get us going...

Sanding was complete...

First a coat of epoxy was applied to seal the wood. That way the cedar wouldn't suck the resin out of the glass. 6 hours later that was dry.

And then we cut the glass to size and draped it over the kayaks... really kind of a shock... its tough to believe that is going to go clear after the resin is put on. So we decided to work together and start with mine and do Leslies after.

Dressed to work with epoxy... its a glamorous job! VOC filters, rubber gloves and old cloths. Epoxy never comes out of cloths.

But the results look good! This is the color it will be when finished too... the epoxy really brings out the color of the cedar.

John's

Leslies

We have a couple more coats of epoxy and glass tape down the keel to apply and then we get to turn them over and start on the decks! Hopefully this weekend...

A little more progress... the hulls are cleaned up a little, just using scrapers and we have begun adding the stem and stern pieces. Just a double laminate of 1/8" thick strips that are bent using a heat gun. The heat gun makes the lignum [the natural glue that holds the wood fibers together] soften and you can bend a long way, much further than you might expect.

Next comes the big clean-up, lots of sanding and then the fiber glassing. We spent a few hundred bucks this week ordering glass fiber matting and Mas Epoxy resin. We are very lucky to have Newfound Woodworks on our 'doorstep' so we took a trip over there to get the epoxy resin and some other supplies. They had the best price on Mas epoxy that I found anywhere!