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Cedar Strip Kayak

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vtsteam:
Fergus, you must have read John MacGregor? I have some of the original Rob Roy canoe travel adventure books. Mid 1800's decked canoe voyaging.

Fergus OMore:

--- Quote from: vtsteam on January 09, 2016, 03:28:03 PM ---Fergus, you must have read John MacGregor? I have some of the original Rob Roy canoe travel adventure books. Mid 1800's decked canoe voyaging.

--- End quote ---

Ah yes, stuff of legends. A young lads dream-so thank you for the memory or memories. In all, I would thoroughly recommend the sheer excitement to others. As long as there was a bit of water more than could fill a wet sponge, I'd have a go! So I'm enjoying the articles and wish that I was just a bit younger.

My kind regards to you all


Norman 

sparky961:
A little update to my slow-motion kayak build... got the first couple of strips mounted.  I think I was putting it off for fear of messing things up, but seem to have gotten over that now.  There's a lot of up-turn in the bow and stern so these first few strips have been putting up a good fight.  I learned quickly that I don't own enough clamps but might just try to make do with what I do have.

I'm trying to avoid putting too many staple/nail holes in the strips, though the bow and stern have been exempted from that requirement.  The combination of staples, finishing nails, clamps, and packing tape seems to be holding things well enough for now.  My only fear is that half way though the job - or even when removing it from the forms - I'm going to hear a loud "CRACK" and a bunch of strips are going to revert to their preferred "straight" orientation.  I hope that the bend will have a tendency to set into the wood by the time I'm ready to take it off the forms.  Once I get the glassing done I doubt anything will be able to move.

I believe these first couple strips will be the most difficult.  The rest shouldn't be quite so difficult to bend and the rest of the boat will provide structure to attach them to and hold in place while the glue dries.  Because I'm trying to go mostly staple-less, applying the strips will be a slow process indeed.  Meh... no rush.  This is something I'm doing when I can't bring myself to do other things.

Oh, and something else that just came to mind when I was adding the pictures below.  I had forgotten from my previous wood gluing experiences that putting metal clamps directly in contact with wet glue leaves nasty black spots on the wood!  DOH!  I think they'll clean up alright with the planing and sanding to come.  I have a plan B if they don't.  I've been putting clear tape underneath them now.

Fergus OMore:
Glad that you are making progress but making me somewhat jealous.

As for black staining, might I suggest oxalic acid?  Working as we did on 'folders' there was a lot of ashwood and it stained really badly especially immersed in sea water.

I'm going back a bit( well, more than a bit, but we pinned veneers down but with bits of scrap veneer.

Best wishes for your success

Norman

sparky961:
I've been continuing to plug away at this in very small increments, but I recently reached a bit of a milestone so I thought I'd put up some recent pictures.

As the strips are laid side by side up the hull, you get to a point where the ends meet more horizontally than vertically.  According to Nick Schade's book, this is when you install the keel strips.  That's where I'm at!  I know it doesn't seem like a lot, but I've been taking my time on this making all of my joints fit as well as I can make them.  I'm also not using many staples/nails so it means that only one strip can be applied and the glue left to dry.  So at most I can do one strip per day, though I've done two on some weekends. :)

The keel strips are interesting.  There's about 5-6 hours of work in those two little strips!  There are two angles that need to meet snugly in the bow (front), and the same angles plus overall length in the stern (back).  At the same time there's a bevel that gets planed between the two so they meet at an angle and have a wide flat gluing surface.  This bevel varies over the length so it's rather finicky.

Plenty of clamps and tape later, plus 2 days of drying (the ends were _really_ sprung so I wanted the glue _very_ dry before trying to remove the clamps) and I'm very happy with the results.  The ends meet as nice as I'd expect, the bevel looks good, and most importantly it runs in a very straight line down the middle of the hull.

The next step is to start filling in the two voids on either side of the keep strip.  It's starting to look like a boat!

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