Naiadhome

After glassing the hull and applying three thin fill coats of epoxy I removed the hull with the forms still attached from the strong back and suspended this in a couple of webbing slings.

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Removing the supports and the forms was followed by some cleanup of the hull interior using scrapers. Here's the bow section the right way up now. I haven't done any cleanup of the hull exterior yet other than remove some of the more egregious drips. I'll sand the hull and deck once they have been joined as per Rob's suggestions.

First pass cleanup of the hull, with pencil marks where the formers go.

After cleaning up the forms go back into the hull at the marked positions. They are secured with small dabs of hot glue.

For the deck design I decided to have a dark edge to the deck with some highlights. I originally planned some fancy curves using some of the poplar strips, but that's a hard wood to bend, and after a couple of experiments I found the work needed to trim the remaining strips to fit narrow angles just too time consuming and I realised that getting the boat ready to use this summer trumps obsessing over fancy detailing.

So I reverted to a more traditional design with a central king plank of poplar then I'll be filling the rest with darker WRC strips. Here's the progress so far.

Next steps are to complete the deck, then the tail section deck. The design notes originally suggested that the bow deck should be built as a separate part, but its quite possible to do the bow deck and main deck together which is much faster and I think adds a bit more strength to the front of the boat as well.

After that false start the deck went on fairly quickly. I didn't have enough strips of a single colour to do the deck so I decided to have some bands of contrasting colours. Heres a view from the stern.

and the rear and front decking nearly finished.

and finally the decking complete.

On the deck I used a technique from Rob Macks that Nick Schade also shows to use hot glue to keep the edges of the strips aligned while the wood glue sets. This is a lot quicker than taping the edges and seems to have worked quite well. I used a couple of sharp scrapers to cut the straps off and then sanded to deck with 60 grit using my ROS.

I'm really pleased with the strip joints and the general level of the hull. Next steps now are to fabricate the stern deck and more sanding.

I finally got my long board sander from Ebay. It looks similar the Mirka one but at a fraction of the price, so lets see how it holds up. It hooks up to my shop vac and I ordered it with some 80 grit and 120 grit long sanding sheets with pre-punched holes, it works a treat and keeps the dust down.

So my sanding schedule was:

Starting with 60 grit on my ROS to knock down the high spots, mainly where the strip edges formed ridges, followed by 80 grit with the ROS. Then 80 grit with the long board followed by 120 with the ROS and 120 with the long board. This didn't take long as the hull was pretty smooth and fair. Finally I used some 240 in the ROS to get a really smooth finish.

We finally had some dry spring weather today and I managed to get the boat out of the workshop for a good look.

With the warmer weather I decided to start the hull glassing. Although its in the low teens now, its still not really warm enough for the epoxy, so to keep it warm in storage and before use I built a plywood cabinet to keep it around 25C. It is insulated with an old foam camping mat and some foil designed to go behind wall mounted radiators. Its heated using a 20W reptile heater and an STC1000 temperature controller. A bit rough and ready but it works fine.

I'm using MAS Low Viscosity resin with a slow hardener.

As per Rob Mack's recommendations I started with a thin seal coat rolled on. I'm using the WEST yellow rollers, cut in half, and while they roll a good coating, they do have a tendency to de-laminate with the foam coming off after about half the hull is done. Expensive and disappointing! This is after the seal coat for which I mixed 160g (6oz) then (80g) 3oz of resin, though not all of it was finally used.

Next day... Glassing time!. I'm keen to keep the weight down while still having a strong kayak. I'm using a combination of e-glass and s-glass. On the outer skins I'm using 6oz E-glass twill to try and get the clearest layup. On the inside I'm going to use 4oz s-glass, which apparently has a similar strength to 6oz E-glass, but does not wet out as clearly, though it'll be interesting to see the difference.

Here's the hull with the first layup of 6oz e-glass. This first layup used about 400g (10oz) and after squeegeeing there was about 60g (2oz) waste.

Part 4 decking the hull

I've been spending some time finishing the hull. Here are some pictures of progress.

Getting close to the final strips. I've been using some ideas from Rob macks where I hot glue small strips across the joints to make sure the thin strips stay aligned between the forms.

This side of the hull all finished up. The final strips were really thin and I ended up doing it a couple of times.

I used a variety of scrapers to get rid of glue, some of the unevenness and then sanded using 60 grit on my new DeWalt random orbital sander. Here I've wetted the surface to raise the grain and to get a first look at how the colours have worked out.

As usual there are some small gaps that appear after sanding where I'd over beveled, so I've used an idea from Howard Spira on the CLC forum where he masks the gap, applies some PVA glue, lets it set for a while, then after removing the tape sands across the gap which fills with the sanding dust. Very effective as seen here. First one of the gaps.

Taped and some PVA glue applied with a syringe

and after sanding, almost invisible.

Now I'm waiting for a long board sander with a dust extraction feature and some long sanding sheets.

Sanding details and start of the glass layup in Part 3

Woes with an MD2010 Posted on May 1, 2012 by admin

Recently my trusty MD2010 let me down. The engine is 10 years old now, but like many sailing boat engines little used. It gets an outing most weeks from the marina to the race start line and back again, and usually at weekends it gets an hour or so of use. This spring after the yearly haul out and anti-foul the boat went back in, but nothing more was done other than check the engine started. On the first Tuesday night race in April the engine started, but when asked to do some real work failed to increase from a tick-over. The secondary filter was changed but no joy, so we missed that weeks racing. Subsequently I changed the primary filter, cleaned some gunge out of the tank, filled the tank, added some bug treatment, but the engine now failed even to start properly.

I posted a question on the ybw forum (http://www.ybw.com/forums/showthread.php?t=311589 and had a few helpful suggestions.

Reluctantly I called in the professionals (Mike Wills of Cobbs Quay) who found that the injectors were hosing (I guess they were not pressurising properly) and the exhaust was coked up. After a replacement set of injectors and a good clean of the exhaust elbow, the engine now seems ok. Looking forward to my first race of the season tonight!

This blog describes how I am building a baidarka style kayak from Rob Macks at Laughing Loon kayaks.

I've already built two other kayaks - a Wood Duck 12 hybrid from CLC and a Petrel Play strip kayak from Guillemot Kayaks.

You can find the Wood Duck build log here Wood Duck at Fyne Boats "Petrel Play at Fyne Boats" and the Petrel Play

I've been paddling the petrel play for a couple of years and find its a great boat in all sorts of conditions. But, I've been bitten by the boat building bug and I've been thinking about another boat. What am I looking for? Well, slightly longer for speed, although the Petrel Play is fine for normal cruising at 3kts or so, as others have commented on the CLC forum I find I start to get left behind the longer boats if they step on it. Maybe something that tracks better for longer paddles. The Petrel Play is quite easy to turn, and although it has a skeg, it can sometimes be tiring on a windy day to stay on track. It will have to be wood of course, and to make it interesting I plan on using thinner strips without cove and bead. I'm also going to try and build it lighter than my Petrel Play which comes in at 18kg, aiming for 12kg.

I could of course just get another greenland style boat - there are a lot of very good designs out there, but something different also piqued my interest. I came across the baidarka designs from Rob Macks of LaughingLoon kayaks Laughing Loon and the shooting star caught my eye which is 16'6", but as I only have a standard garage and can just about fit a 16 foot kayak in there, Rob suggested a Dark Star which has an overall design length of 15' 6".

The plans were ordered from Rob and they arrived a week or so later from the US together with the instruction book, and some designs for wood paddles I also ordered at the same time. The plans come on two A1 sheets and some A3 sheets for the smaller parts. As per the conditions printed on the sheets I had some copies made so I could cut out the templates for use when tracing the forms.

The wood was bought from a supplier in Hastings in Sussex in the UK, but he is sadly no longer in business. The design calls for 3/16" western red cedar and I also got some tulip wood for accents. The strips don't have cove and bead. There was a nice selection of colours in the wood, so my plan is to have a mainly lighter colour hull with some very light accents and some darker strips around the waterline. The deck will be mainly darker wood with some very dark and light accents. There is enough wood so that most of it will be full length strips, though I will scarf some sections to cut down waste.

Rob's suggested order of construction is to build the tricky bow and stern sections first. These are based on the skin on frame boats that inspired this design. The bow is made of some hardwood lamination and a carved wood block.

Here I've glued the shaped laminations and I'm adding a thin accent strip.

For the stern section, first the stern forms are cut out and glued together to make the mold for the stern.

. Then the stern strips are bent using a heat gun and attached to the forms with hot glue. Lots of clamps needed here.

Unlike the internal strong back used on the Petrel Play, Rob Mack's designs use an external strong back, so the first task was to assemble this strong back from 12mm plywood. I did use the internal strong back from the Petrel Play build as an internal beam for the new strong back. I had B&Q cut the full sheet of plywood for me as they can produce really straight cuts and accurate measuring.

The forms were cut from 12mm plywood. Setting these up with the brackets, getting them level, measured and adjusted and then getting some left over strips to check for fairness took a long time, but as Rob and others say, this is an important step to make sure the hull and deck are fair.

I also built a table to work on and attached some wheels so I could move it around the garage. I'm working in a standard garage and I can fit the 16' boat length with enough room to get round one end, so wheels make it much easier to move around, and get it outside when I need to get at other stuff in the garage.

Here I've attached the bow and stern forms and started adding strips.

I used hot glue to attach the strips to the forms and there are areas when I've used additional little scraps hot glued to make sure that the edges are tight against each other. All bevels are hand planed with my little block plane, this only takes a few minutes per strip.

Part two