Kayak Build, Day 6

Well, sort of. It's more like day 6, 7 and 8, but if I'd blogged each day you would have got bored, since I was doing the same thing each day.

Saturday, after Donna and I finished our boat course, I spent an hour and a half removing nails one at a time and replacing them with dowels. Once the beams were pegged they were lashed using brickie's string, or mason's twine if you don't live in Australia. I did the same thing for an hour and a half yesterday, after we'd spent the day fishing on Donna's sister's 42' cruiser in Moreton Bay. A boat that Donna's brother-in-law built himself. Today I spent another three and a half hours doing the same thing before going to work. Pegging and lashing I mean, not building a 42' cruiser.

I mentioned in the previous entry that the instructions say you only need to lash every other beam, but I chose to do all of them for piece of mind. After lashing eleven beams and each end of the kayak, my fingers are a little sore. I'm told the artificial sinew that some people use for lashing, and I'll be using to sew the fabric on, is murder on the fingers, to the extent that a lot of electrical tape is used on fingers to protect them. I've used it before to lace cable runs when I was an apprentice and didn't have a problem with it then. We'll see how I go when it comes time to sew.

The two next pictures show the lashings. Basically you do about four turns in a figure eight pattern as tight as you can without cutting your fingers off, then you do half hitches over that to pull it even tighter. I made a comment the other day about the whole thing exploding in the middle of Moreton Bay. I don't think that'll be happening now that I've got it all tied down.

You can also see in the first picture where the windlass has left a mark in the gunwales. That's not too bad, as it'll mostly be planed out. In future though, I'll use thicker rope for the windlasses and maybe put something under them to protect the wood.





One thing I found while drilling was that, because the Tasmanian Oak I'm using for the beams is harder than the cedar gunwales, drilling into the end grain was quite hard. I think it added a lot of time to the job.

So here's the (almost) finished deck. Yes I know, the lawn needs mowing.



All that remains to be done to the deck is to plane the top of the gunwales and sand the dowels flush. Stringers will be added, running from the masik forward and the back-rest back. They'll be fitted once the hull is done. I tried it out for size before I took it out of the shed and it fits like a pair of gloves, or a tailored pair of trousers. I even pretended to have a paddle in it, which is why I tried it out in the shed and not out in the yard where the neighbours could see me.

The next step, after the planing, is to lash three temporary spacers under the deck and to lash the keelson to that. The stem and stern pieces will then be fitted, before I start on the ribs which will give it its final shape.

Time spent on this part of the job was seven hours, which takes it to twenty four and a half hours total.