Long Time A Comin'

I've finally finished all the prep work and have begun putting the kayak together.  Lots of things had to be done before I even started building the kayak.

At Dan's house I borrowed some of his tools and he helped me get set up.  I cut the planks into 3/8" strips on the table saw.
Then, Dan and I were running the strips through the planer and it broke, the rollers were jammed and nothing was getting through.  So I took it in hopes of fixing it.
The strips sat awhile.  I took the planer apart, found the broken sprocket, it looked porous so I thought I'd give it a shot and super-glue it.  One board went through, but then it broke on the second one.  Online the specific sprocket was back-ordered till April.  A couple weeks went by and my friend Greg, a construction professor over at UAS, offered to help and said I could use the planer at the university.  Three days of planing in between 3:30 and 5:00 pm then I had 192 1/4" thick Western Red Cedar strips at twelve feet long and 3/4" wide.

The next step was to put a bead and cove on them.
I had my router bits all ready.  

So with the router bits, and thanks to Uncle Doug - a nice router, and thanks to Dan - a router table, and two days of full-on routering my strips were ready.

This is the router table setup.  The featherboards make the job very easy.  The strip has no way to stray or kick-back.

Then I had a few things to do to get the forms lined up and secured.  And there's tape that goes around any spot where glue might adhere the strips to the forms.  You don't want it to be too difficult to get the kayak and the forms separated.

Getting everything lined up properly proved to be much more difficult than I anticipated also.

The two sheer strips went on the other day.  Now I finally feel like the kayak is being built.  I'm going to post a picture everyday to show progress because hopefully it goes really quickly now.


In this post I would like to thank Karen for the place to work, Doug for the router, Dan for the use of the table saw, router table, planer, help with doing some of the work and a couple of tools that I borrowed, Jasper for the tools I've borrowed, and Greg for letting me use the planer at the university and help transporting the strips.