The Kayak Part 1

I pretty much will never get this blog caught up to all the stories I want to share.  I'll just have to tell you all the stories I have when I see you next.

This summer I made the drawings for the kayak.  In Nick Schade's book he gives a table of offsets and from that you can make an x and y scatter plot.  I saved the x and y scatter plot as a script file and then imported it in to AutoCAD. I don't own AutoCAD but I sure got a good use out of the 30-day trial. I had a cool picture of the kayak drawn up in AutoCAD but I think it disappeared when my Windows 30-day trial was up.  Apparently, I didn't save it onto the Macintosh half of my hard-drive.  Well, after spending lots of time trying to perfect the drawings I had them printed off at a local civil engineering firm.  I was so curious as to how close my drawings were to the real thing that I couldn't resist purchasing the real plans to compare. I'm glad I did because there were a number of differences. Mine are on the right and the real ones are on the left.

In September, my western red cedar arrived from Hoonah. The lumber mill that it came from had quite a fire this summer. Fortunately, everyone was okay and their business survived. I was going to build out by my apartment but Karen offered that I could build in her building! She said she didn't want to see me go from the building and that maybe a class from the high school next door might be interested in seeing the kayak's progress.  I thought that sounded like a great idea!

I pasted the drawings onto 1/2" plywood and cut those out with a jig saw.  They looked beautiful.  I didn't want to cut them anymore, but I did. I cut holes in the middle so I could place them on the strongback.

Well, that's all I have so far!  I need to rip down all the cedar planks I have (you might be able to see them in the back of the pictures).  Once I rip those down I'll be running the strips along these forms and that will really flesh out the kayak.