3 DECK

     Today I took a first pass at the deck design.  While I had originally planned to keep it simple since this is my first build, of course, I just couldn’t resist the opportunity to make this difficult.  To further complicate the curvy deck design, i’d like to carry the deep red color of the red cedar onto the hull in the form of a matching stain.  Following some helpful responses on the guillemotkayaks.com forum, that will prove to be again a bit harder than i’d imagined.  It turns out that epoxy will now adhere to standard stain and analine dye must actually be used.  The dye has to be colored through trial and error to match the color of the red cedar, and fading of the cedar has to be taken into account for a true match.  With all this said, i’m questioning coloring the hull but will make the final decision before i fiberglass and epoxy.

DECK DESIGN REFINED

     Took a first pass at refining the deck design by drafting in CAD and planning out how i’ll approach this.

INTERNAL FORMS INSTALLED

With the hull complete and deck design figured out, I ordered the wood for my deck strips.  After much searching for a good lumberyard in the area I finally decided to let the pros at CLC choose the best wood.  I ordered (12) 1″x4″x8′ boards of Western Red Cedar specifying that i would like 4 boards of each dark, medium, and light coloring.  Hopefully the wood will arrive next week and the colors will be what i am expecting.  I have doughts on whether the light western red cedar will be light enough to give good contrast, but we shall see.  While I wait for the boards, i have set up the internal forms within the hull.  During stitching and glassing the hull I believe I pinched the hull a bit, maybe a half inch,  mostly around the rear of the boat.  This made almost none of the forms fit on the first attempt so I had to sand a sliver off each for a nice fit that kept a nice fair curve.  Starting in the middle working fore and aft I tacked each form in place with some hotmelt glue being sure that everything remained fair and centered.  The whole process took about 3 hours working at a pretty leisurely pace.  I created a batten from a 2×4 that was laying around to check the curvature on the tops of the series of forms. At first glance it looks like 2-3 of the forms may need to shift, but in whole, I was pretty shocked at how nice the bend of the batten was with no adjustments.  Now i’m playing the waiting game and doing some setup on the router table in preparation for creating the strips.

MAKING STRIPS

I ordered 12 4″x8′ boards of Western Red Cedar from CLC about 2 weeks ago.  I requested 1/3 of light, medium, and dark coloring which they chose beautifully.  Throughout this week i seperated the boards by color and ripped them into 1/4″ slices.  Before ripping I built (2) 8′ extensions for the table saw to make ripping easier.  It took much longer to rip the strips than expected, about 5 hours.  It went very slow because following each cut you must re-adjust the featherboards.  Once finished ripping i set up the router and a series of featherboards, and guides.  After a few test cuts and minor adjustments i began to route the bead on each strip, another 4 hours.  Then finally i re-adjusted and routed the cove on each board, a final 4 hours.  Now with the strips ripped i’m finally ready to start stripping the deck!

–

–

–

–

THE FIRST STRIPS!

And finally the day has arrived.  After an intial unsatisfying attempt at placing a sheer strip on one side of the deck I took a step back and rethought my approached (and did some more research, thanks everyone on the guillemot kayak forum).  Rather than making the sheer strips first, I decided to run a kingstrip down the centerline of the whole deck consisting of (2) 3/8″+- strips of my ‘medium’ western red cedar.  This differs slightly from the original plans but i think it will help give a nice straight reference for subsequent strips that was otherwise lacking.  To create the kingstrips i first temporarily clamped the strip to each form with some spring clamps and the homemade ‘C’ shapes shown ealier.  Prior to clamping i ran a quick bevel to the inside edge of each of the 2 strips to account for slight peak along the centerline of the forms. While clamping i adjusted to get the strip as straight as possible with one edge along the centerline of the forms.  Once satisfied I tacked this strip to the forms with a little hot glue.  To allow for the strip to more easily conform to the abrupt sweep of the bow and stern, I bent the strip while passing a heat gun over the area to be bent.  With the first strip in place I was able to run a bead of hot glue and clamp/tape the second strip to the first on the opposite side of the centerline.  Voila, kingstrip in place and next will be back to the sheer strip before adding the detail strips and finally filling in the blanks.

SHEER STRIPS IN PLACE.

Hopefully these are the hardest strips to attach.  Over this past weekend i spent about 9 hours laying the 2 sheer strips around the perimeter with dark western red cedar.  First i cut the bead/cove off each strip making the strips about 1/2″ wide to allow for slightly easier twist.  Next was the fun part; since these strips butt against the bead of the kingstrip I had to create a cove along the angled end  of each sheer strip.  To do this i first dry fit the strip and scored a line for the angle of the initial cut.  Then I used a radiused file to slowing rub a cove into each end.  This step took about an hour for all four ends.  Before attaching the strips to the forms with hot glue i first dry fit everything with spring clamps and the ‘C’ shapes made earlier.  Once dry fit i began to rub water along the strip and heating them with a heat gun to help make the twisting action a bit easier.  Between the ends of the boat to the cockpit these strips twist about 90 degrees (which is not easy at all).  Now that the strips are holding their shape better and everything has been dry fit i was able to tack them with hot glue and finally wood glue the ends to the kingstrip.

While waiting for the sheer strips to dry, I went to the lumber yard for some poplar which i ripped into 1/8″ strips which will eventually be the ‘white’ pinstrips seen in the drawing above.

–

JUST KEEP STRIPPING

It’s been about 2 weeks since the first strips went on the deck.  Since then i have added some thin curving detail strips that serve as boundries between different color WRC strips.  Following the detail strips i began with some of the light WRC strips across the rear of the deck and then moved to the front and added a set of dar WRC to each side.  Things are moving along much fast now that the first few strips are finished and i have a handle on the process involved with each strip. 

The process is as follows: 1)  Select the color strip and decide whether the bead and cove are needed 2) cut off bead/cove if needed 3) hold strip in place and mark angle at each end to be planed off 4) plane end(s) to angle 5) use rounded file to sand cove into planed end to interlock with king strip 6) dry-fit strip 7) if longer strip needed, repeat 1-6 for opposite end 8 ) cut scarf joint in each strip and join together to make full strip 9) second dry-fit 10) apply glue and lay strip in place 11) use tape/clamps to hold strip tight to previous strip.

While i didn’t think i’d make the May 13th deadline i previously planned on (day of CLC’s OkoumeFEST), now it looks like I might just make it, if i can keep up this pace.

STILL STRIPPING

This weekend was fantastic.  I had about 12 hours of off/on time to continue stripping the deck and managed to get about 30 strips in place.  I have finished filling in all the strips between the shear and the wavy thin strip seen in the image above.  Now all thats left is to finish off the strips which parallel the kingstrip.  I believe these will be much easier than all the strips to this point, but we shall see.  I hope to have all of these strips finished by next weekend so I can begin on the cockpit recess.  Before this weekend i didn’t think i’d make my deadline of May 13th for OkoumeFest but now, depending on the cockpit, there’s still hope.

 

AND THE STRIPS ARE ON!

 So i’m a bit behind on updating the blog.  With that said, i’ve progressed quite a bit since the last posting and have a lot of updates.  After finishing the curving strips more near the sheer line of the kayak, I proceeded with stripping the center with strips parallel to the kingstrip, starting with those closest to the kingstrip.  The pattern in the center contains 1-1/2 strips of the ‘medium’ colored western red cedar seperated by an 1/8″ strip of poplar accents.  These strips were far easier to strip until i reached the final 5-6 strips on each side.  The final strips had to make a tight twist and dip from the front to rear of the cockpit and took a bit of persuading with water and a heat gun to bend into place.  I made it to the last 2 strips before realizing i just couldn’t make the bend; so i had to take off about 5 on each side and start the twisting ealier.  Now, i’m glad that part is over; while it was fun in the beginning, it got old after the first 80 strips.  I would estimate about 30 hours to strip the whole deck, but thats a pretty rough guess as i’ve completely lost track of time and money spent so far. 

Now that the deck is finished i move on to the cockpit.  The cockpit consists of a recess, and the actual cockpit hole.  First i cut the recess in the stripped deck using the paper template supplied in the plans.  Then, after fairing this cut with a small file, i began to strip the ‘dark’ western red cedar strips horizontally across the opening.  The actual cockpit opening gets cut from 1-3 inches inside the recess whole so i only need to strip partially across the opening.  Every 5th strip i continued across the whole opening to help support the adjacent pieces and add some extra temporary strength.

The recess was probably the quickest single step so far, only took about 4 hours.  Once the recess was finished i began to do a bit more sanding and fairing across the whole deck; filling in gaps on occasion with some wood scraps.  To sand i started with 60 grit paper by hand, knocking down all the noticable steps.  Then i built a 2′ fairing board with a scrap of plywood and some 4″ screw-on wood furniture legs from lowes.  I used this to sand horizontally over the deck to get the curvature as uniform as possible.  Next i moved to 120 grit paper on the random orbital sander to further smooth the whole deck.  I will eventually move to 220 grit, but first i need to round over the edges where the deck and hull meet, then, the deck will be complete and ready for glassing.