Because my autumn travel schedule wasn't busy enough, I decided to take advantage of an opportunity to travel to beautiful Port Townsend, WA......
....to build a kayak!! I have wanted to do this for...a while (more than a decade) and got on a waitlist a few months ago. When I got there I didn't even remember which boat kit I bought. Yep, real impressive. Turns out this stack of pieces was mine.
I even managed to get (almost) all the tools on the list before the class. Not that I will remember how to use any of them by the time I see them again.
The first two pieces are together!! Gorilla tape is my new favorite...tool? Not sure that really meets the classic definition of the term....
Here are the next two pieces attached and the next one staged for installation.
Inspection time...how does it look? (It looks fine to me, but it turns out I don't have as good of an eye for it as someone who has done this before. duh.) These boat builders are amazing. I'm used to male species being ...uh, less refined? Not these guys. They kept fussing over stuff I couldn't even see. Like pieces that were off less than 1/16th of an inch.
Inside upside down is pretty too. You can see some of the wires, but it doesn't look like a dental experiment.
...unlike the outside. See the push pins? I don't even know what he was adjusting. But I'm sure my boat will paddle better because of this attention to detail.....
Starting to look like a boat! The workshop is open to the public while you build your boat. My work station was closest to the throughway. I tried not to talk to people. Mostly because I didn't really think I could answer their questions. Except I was pretty sure my boat would not be striped in the end. It just looked like a zebra for a short time.
Turns out some of the random pieces in the stack are not actual boat pieces, they are forms that keep things in place while the epoxy dries.
Just like in SAR training, I attract wildlife....
When the bottom is pretty solid you use it and the forms to build the deck. More zebra tape and wires.
More than one set of hands works better. This is the trickiest part (I think), it's right behind where I will eventually be sitting and there are a lot of pieces that have to come together just so. It wasn't working very well, not the fault of the kit, more like the fault of the first time boat builder.
Aha! It worked. I glued all the seams and it set up over night.
Then the deck comes back off. There's a lot of that. Looking like you are moving forward only to come in the next day and go the other way. Here the inside seams of the deck have had fiberglass tape applied. That was a little scary.
Easy peasy. Looks totally professional. Maybe I missed my calling in life....
And the deck is off again. Very reasonably, fiberglass cloth does not lay very flat over sharp edges. So you get to fill them in. For some odd reason, my epoxy was darker than everyone elses, every time.
Fiberglass on the entire inside of the deck.....
....and laying the cloth to do the same for the hull. A little intimidating, but not if you don't realize it's suppossed to be hard. I love being clueless.
See, no problem!!
Looks almost like a boat, no? See that guy back there walking by my boat? Yeah, he was the bearer of all the (daunting) details left to finish the boat. Turns out we were only about half way through the instruction manual at the end of a week long class. The top and bottom are fiberglassed on the inside and they are epoxied together on the outside.
My boat went to hang out in Eastern WA for the winter (thanks Mom). In true Mo tradition, I visited the boat show room at the end of the class, something most people do - in addition to actually paddling a couple models - before they pick a kit or build a boat.
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