So, I dove right into working on the boat tonight when I got home. Got out all the wood peices, the paperwork, and the drill. Put all the wood peices back. I decided that I might want to charge the battery for the drill. Not a problem. Break out the little hacksaw I picked up. I know what hacksaw I want, I just can’t find it in a store. Todd has one, that is where I saw it. I bet a nickel it’s sitting in the windowsill of his front room right now! I did a number on the blade tonight. I probably got a quarter of the aluminum cut before I totaly ruined it.
Hopefully I will find time this weekend to get the pecies far enough along to start assembling them. That is the fun part of this boat design. Playing with the peices!
I worked on the Kayak when I got home tonight. I finished cutting all the 1″ wide lengths. I beveled the edges of what I cut tonight with a block plane. I broke 1 peice doing this. So now I have to re-cut that peice.
It looks like I will need to fill the voids on my longer peices if they are going to be useable. I am thinking of just shoving wood glue and sawdust into the holes. That oughta reinforce the peices enough.
I fiddled around with the broken peice and came up with a jig to cut the half round ends on most of the peices. I will just cut of a small 45 degree peice off of each corner, and 2 or three strokes with the block plane rounds the peices out quite well. Any finishing should be managable when sanding the peices down.
Counting up what I have left for wood, I have more then enough for another 2 full boats. I am planning on making both of them. Things are just so much more fun when you can do it with somebody else. I am thinking that this first boat is going to be a bit short for me to sit in comfortably, so I am probably going to make the next one longer. I will probably try to sell the 3rd one to recoup some of the costs in making them.
I have been looking at how canvas skins are put on other types of boats, and I think I am going to deviate from the “specs” a bit. I am going to add a ton of loops all along the sewn edges of the kayak. I will then lace these up over the top like a corset. This should enable me to cinch the bottom part of the skin – that touches the water and really ought to be fairly tight and smooth – snug. I haven’t seen any DIY boats that have this feature, but I did see a photo that had a lot of lashings across the deck and it might have been a commercial unit that did this. It’s hard to tell, as it appears that most kayaks have lashes across the top to stow gear, and tuck you paddle away so it doesn’t float off on you when you stop paddling.
I have been reading a lot about building Kayaks, and I found 2 more that I want to build. The one I am currently building I would consider a “casual” Kayak, not really all that good on the water, but you know, it stores small and sets up fast. I will probably keep the goofy thing in the trunk of the car so it is with me where ever I go. There is another type of kayak called a Greenland Kayak that can be made to be broken down. However, this boat is lashed together, so it takes about 2 hours to tie the thing up once your good at it. It also is a mess of little peices that don’t sit flat with each other. The long peices are about 6 feet long, and the short peices would fill a suitcase. This, however, is a “real” kayak that would be seaworthy. There is a third kind that is made with thin strips of wood. They are absolutely beautiful! I have always loved a fine peice of woodwork, and these boats qualify!
So, IF I start using the kayak I am making now a lot, and IF I decide I like kayaking, and IF I decide I need another boat that is better and IF I don’t have a large place to keep it, I will be making a Greenland Kayak.
When I get a place where I can store a non-collapsable kayak, I just might make an all wooden one.
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.
Katie dropped in Thursday night unannounced. Lucky me! She had her brother’s truck, so after I took her to lunch today at a chinese restaraunt, we went to Lowes to pick up a table saw I have been looking at for a few weeks now and a sheet of plywood. The last saw they had. Every other person who walks through that door is likely to toss the box that the saw came in, but I am only going to use the thing every six months or so, right? Of COURSE my box is completely mangled. No point tearing the thing down and re-packing it for storage now. The saw is a “contractors” saw, so it is designed to be portable. The legs fold up, and it has a handle and wheels so it can be pushed around where you want it. Really quite slick. It weighs in at a trim 73 pounds. I am not going to want to put it up on a shelf or anything, but it is managable. The table expands to a pretty big size. The table goes out like 16″ before you can expand the table out with the rip fence on it. Pretty cool. There is a section in back to help hold the material as well. I also picked up 2 adjustable, folding roller stands. I knew I was going to have trouble manhandling a sheet of plywood by myself. I am likely to go get 2 more if I ever need to do a full sheet of plywood by myself again. This is all that is left of my $26.95 peice of 1/2 inch birch plywood. I am cutting it into 1 inch strips to make the frame of a folding kayak I am going to make. I made $2.21 worth of sawdust in the dust collector which caught probably 3/4 of the sawdust and on the ground. I had to go to Target and get a little hand broom to clean off the saw and clean up my mess.
I am tired. I walked about 5 miles today between going to Target and Skyline for supper, plus I was on my feet all afternoon assembling and working that saw – I am used to sitting on my duff all day long.
Oh yeah! I put the whole saw together and only had one little un-opened baggy of spare parts! (I think they are adjustment shims to square up the saw blade to the table incase it is off. The instructions don’t mention them beyond the parts list)
Ok, I have been a bit quite lately, I have been working on… stuff. You shall see, it’s the biggest thing since, well, I moved to Florida.
Anyway, I digress, I have added a new feature to my blog. I have a random list of books that I own courtesy of Library Thing in the narrow column. You can also search my current books.
I had ran across them a while ago, how long ago, I don’t remember, but it is that long ago (what, 3 minutes some of my friends may claim?). I have been meaning to check them out and whatnot, so tonight I did.
I found a use for my CueCat. That’s right, they allow you to scan in the ISBN bar codes with your CueCat directly. How is THAT for convenient. Talk about a BFO (blinding flash of the obvious). Pure Genius! The only thing I saw about it, is that I was mentally saying “beep” in my head every time I scanned a bar code. I was running around my apartment (read: stand up, reach, sit down) thinking “beep beep beep this is so cool beep beep”.
Now, too bad most of my books are in storage, at my folks place, etc. Now I have yet another reason to go back to Barnes & Noble’s and get more!
