Naiadhome

Slow but steady progress recently. Glassing the hull and deck insides, fitting maroske fittings for the rigging, building the skeg box, stripping some panels for the bulkheads, and other fiddly bits all take a lot longer than initial estimates. Oh, and time to paddle as well!

Heres a picture from the bow of the glassed deck with 3 fill coats.

Now its time to glass the hull interior. I decided to get a bit fancy in this section by using some carbon/Kevlar composite cloth. Why? well I think it looks cool, I would only need one layer of cloth here because of the strength of the carbon/Kevlar construction, I wanted to try something different, and to be honest it hides the less than perfect beveling on some of the strips in the bottom of the hull which would look a bit rough if I tried to fill them. This is 165gms or just over 4oz so no real weight penalty either.

It was harder to wet out than standard cloth, but the specs say that the resin to cloth ratio should be 1:1 so I measured enough epoxy to wet out and apply a single fill coat. It does change colour slightly by getting a bit darker when wet and a strong low level light helps as well.

Next up was to cut some holes in the boat for the skeg. I'm using the design from Nick Schade which I used on the Petrel Play. Its fairly easy to build the skeg housing which goes into a slot near the stern from standard ply well glassed inside and out.

The box is built with all four sides in place, and then after glassing into the hull the bottom is sliced off. The second hole is for the skeg control. In this case I 3D printed the case and this is the hole where it will live. Things start to get a bit fragile here until its all put together. You can see the control box in the bottom of the hull with the stainless cable guides.

I also added some maroske fittings I 3D printed. I like these as it means no deck level fitting to get caught on when re-entering the boat and they are almost indestructible. In this build I decided to separate the deck lines from the bungees to simplify rigging later so there are 26 fittings in total.

Here you can also see the back bevel I'm putting on the deck to ensure a tight clean join. Rob helpfully suggested that over beveling would help achieve a tight fit.

Ok, the slow time consuming detail work is now done at least for now. Time to glue the top to the bottom. Yards of reinforced packing tape and gently easing the two halves together it starts to look like a boat.

Not perfect, but I'm pretty happy with this join.

Time to cut the hatches out so I can get inside to apply the tape and glue. Nice big hatches on this boat. On my Petrel Play I have one small hatch which is fine for lunch, but a struggle to get anything like a dry bag in.

The taping took time to try and get the tape wetted out without too many bubbles and without great pools of resin lurking in the join, but I got there in the end. Very happy that after the taping there was almost no leakage of epoxy to the outside of the seam, so I'm pretty certain this is a really good fit, worth the 2-3 hours fussing with the bevels.

The inside isn't pretty with rather too many unwanted drips and other imperfections, but the top and bottom are now one. This also shows the skeg box in place in the stern.

This is the hull and deck after taping and all the packing tape removed.

There is a piece of glass missing from the front of the deck right now as it started to show signs of stress marks as I forced the deck into shape at this point, so I used a heat gun to soften it and take it off so I can get a clear coat here, probably as part of the outer seaming which will happen fairly soon. I had a similar problem at the stern so that also has a small area removed.

I'm also not happy with the tail deck as it curled up after glassing and forcing it to fit is going to damage something, so I'll be re-doing that as well.

Next up is the out seam, the hatch supports and the coaming.

The build has slowed recently, but some progress has been made. The deck was sanded some more with the ROS and the long board using 80 then 120 and finally 240 grit. Super smooth surface and only a few gaps opened up. Here I again used the glue/sand method and they mostly disappeared. The next step was to cut out the cockpit opening. I didn't follow Rob Mack's suggestion of laminating the cockpit as I didn't want to have to try and source thin pieces of wood and I don't really have the space to build the laminating frame. I intend to use vertical strips for the riser and some ash for the lip as I did on my Petrel Play. I chose a cutout the same size as my PP so I can use the same spray skirt and I find the size a good fit. So I drew up a paper template and used that to cut the opening. Rob's instructions show a dropped front to the opening which I think looks nice and probably stops some water from splashing up when the boat hits a wave. The deck is pretty flimsy at this point and care needs to be taken not to crack or break things.

I also stripped the aft deck which is on a different plane to the main deck, and I wanted to continue the main deck pattern to the very end.

To try and get the best finish I put a thin seal coat on which brings out the colours.

Here you can also see the gap between the dropped deck and the main deck with a thin fillet.

And finally time to glass the deck. Here I decided to use 4oz S-glass. It has a much finer weave and is harder to wet out than twill used on the hull, but it turned out fine, even if the weave is slightly more discernible at close quarters.

Next steps and some boring bits, building the skeg, a couple of strip planks for the bulkheads and cleaning, sanding and glassing the inside of the deck. Part 6

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 part 5

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