Well, I have been talking about making a PakYak for a while now. This weekend, and to some degree even more so tonight, I started on it.
This weekend I cut down a sheet of 1/2 inch Birch plywood into 1 inch strips and a 2 inch strip with a bit left over. Hence the tablesaw.
I bundled up the 1 inch pieces into groups of 8 like this and tied them together so that they wouldn’t warp standing up in the corner like they are. Well, that’s the theory. They are also easier to handle this way.
The sheet of plywood I got looks to be a “bad” piece for what I am doing. I am looking for strength, and voids in the plys of wood weaken the piece. Well my sheet looks to have several voids all at the same spot dead center in the middle of the board. A firm flex breaks the piece right in half. I guess this made it easier to handle the pieces for cutting. But I need a lot of 24 inch long pieces and with an inch unusable in the middle, I can only get two 24 inch pieces out of my 8 foot length! How frustrating.
This is about half of a complete boat’s worth of pieces. I need to cut a dozen and a half 2 foot long pieces and a handful of little pieces between 7 and 4 inches yet.
Next step. drilling and shaping. They are all to be rounded with a 1/4 inch bevel. I am going to do this with a block plane instead of a router. The big reason is that the table saw ate up my power-tool allotment for a while and I don’t have a place to keep the saw, much less a table router as well. I also just like the sound of a good sharp block plane. That sizzle and pile of shavings just really adds a hand crafted feeling to the piece. Between cutting the pieces to length with a hand saw, and shaping all the edges by hand my need to “Make something with my hands” should be satisfied.
