Resurrecting the blog

Hi. Please bear with me while I try to start blogging again. I was blogging a bunch and then I didn't finish the kayak and then I went kayaking and then I stopped blogging.

This is the kayak as it looked on the 10th of September 2011.  I put a coat of epoxy on the deck.  Then storms came and I covered it with a tarp but the storms were strong and I was at work and then I had to do some repairs to the ends.  Now it's stored for a while.

My summer was a lot of biking and hiking.  And I lived with a piano and I played a lot of piano.  

These are my favorite photos from this last summer:

And I still need to actually do a post covering the kayak trip.

Building the cockpit

A slideshow

Another picture

It's pretty :)

Cockpit time

I'm letting some glue dry and then I'm gonna cut-out the spot for the cockpit.

Happy Easter!

Deck is coming along.

Flipped

Hull done, boat flipped. Cleaning at the moment.

Deck coming up

Yesterday was productive, and I even finished my taxes yesterday.  I'm getting much more efficient.  Today I am hoping to be productive, too.

More bottom

The two strips down the middle of the bottom were the hardest to prepare.  The other hardest spot is the little ones closing in the gap.  I actually steamed one of the strips to get it to bend. 

Getting close to the bottom

It's difficult getting some of these strips on!  I'm getting close to the bottom part though, then I'll get to work on the deck.  I'm getting better but it takes a lot of my patience.

The hard part is getting the strip to twist and getting it to lay against the forms.  Even when using staples and/or a finish nail it is hard to get it to go in place.  When you think you've got one spot secure and you go to work down the rest of the strip the beginning spot will come undone!

April 07 - 7 Strips

I got a late start today, but I'm planning on getting quite a bit done.  I'm hoping the speed will pick up too. =)

April 06 - 4 Strips On

The sheer line strips were the toughest.  I managed to get them to follow the sharp curve at the ends.  While putting on the next strips the first ones kept popping out, that was pretty frustrating.  I substituted this afternoon at the alternative school.  I managed to get something done though.  I will try to do two more tonight, I've got a social event though first.

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.

A Beautiful November Morning

It was a great morning to kayak into work today. Work on the kayak took a break for the weekend. Instead, I made key lime pies and went to the movies. There was also a Monthly Grind, I didn't perform but I did help on stage. Pictured below is where the kayak progress is at right now. I accidentally cut the strongback a foot too short. So I'm gonna run to the lumber store, pick up another 16-footer, and run and carry it back here. So, yes, quite literally "run to the store" and "pick up."

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.

Anchorage

My time in Anchorage was brief. I did however get a chance to purchase a new camera, which I'm excited about. 


I got to check out the Anchorage Museum and they had some wonderful paintings of Denali. The "technical" name of the mountain is Mt. McKinley, but I much prefer the native Athabaskan name of Denali which means "The High One."


I also enjoyed seeing these kayaks that the native Alaskans built long ago.

Speaking of kayak building: I haven't made progress with mine! For one, my western red cedar that I'm getting from Hoonah is delayed. And for the other reason I don't have a good place to build. Because I could start without the cedar.  I would place all the forms on the strongback, but I don't have anywhere to do that at the moment. I will have a good place in September though, so I'm just hoping things go smoothly soon.

Projects

A funny thing I've joked about this month is that since my volunteer term with Americorps has ended, I've become a "real" volunteer. There was about a week's worth of work left on the house at the time my year-long service ended on April 1st. I thought it would be pretty ridiculous to spend all those hours and all that work on the house to just quit right before the finish because I wasn't going to be logging any more hours.  So I decided to stay until the house was done. We finished on the 9th and the family moved in that weekend.

Pardon the cleaning supplies. I didn't have a good chance to take pictures once everything was cleaned. 

Lately, I've been helping a former student build a shed in his backyard. We got the fourth wall up tonight. While we were finishing putting the wall together, J.J., another former student, was walking by and we got him to help us put the wall in place.

This is the SketchUp version of the shed at roughly the same stage as the real one.

I also have been working on the progress of getting this cedar strip kayak built. I say "working on the progress" because I don't feel like I've done very much, but I am getting something done. I will cut-out forms of plywood that are like section cuts of the kayak and they will be spaced out every foot. The shape of each form is a crucial part of the building process and each curve has to be drawn precisely. This book I have, The Strip-Built Sea Kayak, written by Nick Schade, has the numbers for all the offsets that define the shape of each form. After plugging the x and y coordinates in an excel spreadsheet, I then saved it as a script file and imported that into AutoCAD. AutoCAD will graph the coordinates and then I can even take that to the printers to print it to scale, or I could piece together sheets of paper and just print it normally. Of course, I had to import the AutoCAD drawings into SketchUp and see what that would look like. ;)

The funny thing is, I don't even own AutoCAD or Excel, but I am very thankful for 30-day trials!

Here's what it looks like in Excel. Excel was useful to sort the x and y coordinates. The graph would've turned out like a connect-the-dots thing in AutoCAD otherwise.

This is the form in AutoCAD. I am not done with the form drawings, however, I have to include the offsets for the cockpit area. After that I'll print these off and paste them to some plywood and cut them out.

And here's what it looks like in SketchUp.

I hope you have a wonderful week!

<3<3<3<3

Joshua