Boatbuilding fever WTF is wrong with me?

[squirell nutkin]

Will you wear a sailor uniform while you do it? I'll sing the Australian Sailor's Hornpipe if you do.

I hit a gumption trap with the siding today so I pulled out the canoe and stripped all the fiberglass off the outside of the hull. I am now debating whether to replace the outer (and probably inner) gunwales. The ones I have on now are ash and they got pretty beaten up one year and show spalting with incipient rot so I stained them dark brown, but I hate the dark look. If I re-do them it will be either with Mahaogany (which is outrageously expensive right now) or maybe spruce. The biggest problem is that they are screwed and epoxied, so I'm not sure how they will come off. On the other hand, if they do come off it will make re-glassing a lot easier.

Either way it is a lot of work. Next up will be sanding and re-fairing the hull.

Glatt, do you have any pictures of your stitch and glue kayak? Is that like a Baidarka?

[casimendocina]

Originally Posted by squirell nutkin

Will you wear a sailor uniform while you do it? I'll sing the Australian Sailor's Hornpipe if you do.

As fair a tradeoff as that sounds, me wearing a sailor uniform (or even just a Japanese girl's school uniform) would just be wrong.

Sounds like you're making amazing progress already-Is your wife on board with the boat project?

[glatt]

Originally Posted by squirell nutkin

Glatt, do you have any pictures of your stitch and glue kayak? Is that like a Baidarka?

Stitch and glue is a construction technique where you cut up thin plywood (quarter inch) into panels, and then you join them together by drilling little holes, spaced every few inches near the panel edges. You cut up some copper wire into 4 inch lengths. You bring the panels next to one another, and starting at one end, you stitch the panels together by using the wires like twist ties through the holes. As you go along, the boat magically comes into shape. You don't tighten the twist ties too tight at first, so you can adjust things a little and make the curves fair, but once everything in in the right place, you tighten it all up. The boat is pretty stiff and rigid at this point and looks like frankenstein with lots of ugly wire poking out all over the place. You flip it over and use thickened epoxy to caulk along all the seams on the inside. Backed with fiberglass tape. Once the epoxy hardens, you flip it back again, and snip off all the wires, and sand them flush with the hull. Then you glass the hull.

It's a very fast way to build a boat, and probably the second cheapest, after skin on frame, where you stretch fabric over a frame.

I built my kayak in about 40 hours, I think.

It looks pretty good, but is not as pretty as a stripper, or a lapstrake. Most people looking at it will be blown away, but you'll know that if you had spent 500 hours, you could have built a truly beautiful boat using more traditional techniques.

[glatt]

Pictures.

This is stitching the panels together. An hour or two of exciting progress. You start the session with some flat pieces of plywood, and a short while later it looks like a real boat.

[glatt]

Glue the seams with epoxy. Add some bulkheads and braces.

Flip it back after the epoxy inside hardens. Looks like Frankenstein with all those wires poking out.

[glatt]

Snip the wires off and sand the joints a bit. Fiberglass the hull.

[glatt]

I skipped the part where I nailed a 3mm deck to the hull. No pictures of that because it was a tricky process bending the plywood and nailing it down as I went.

Here's the finished boat. I was supposed to varnish it to protect the epoxy from UV rays, but I never did. It's stored in the dark, so it's been fine for the past 9 years.

[glatt]

Oh, and it floats.

[glatt]

Originally Posted by glatt

Here's the finished boat. I was supposed to varnish it to protect the epoxy from UV rays, but I never did. It's stored in the dark, so it's been fine for the past 9 years.

It's been 3 years since I wrote that, and the kayak hasn't been treated kindly. Its storage location went from being under a cottage to under a deck. And snow melt got past the cockpit cover and filled the entire kayak, including behind the bulkheads, with water that year.

It's seen too much UV exposure, and lost much of its epoxy finish on the deck.


A close up of the cockpit (with damaged cover in place) shows the real wear and tear on the deck. Lots of bare wood there.