Kayak Construction Part 3

I wanted to get the holes for the foot rests laid out and drilled before the deck went on. I sat in the kayak and placed the rests where they would be most comfortable. Over sized holes were drilled and filled with epoxy.

By drilling and filling oversized holes, I can be assured that there is no way that water can creep in around the screws and get into the bias of the plywood. A layer of three inch fiberglass tape was placed and epoxied on the inside as reinforcement for the foot rests.

The main deck beam was laminated together and precisely trimmed to fit between the sheer clamps. This was glued in place with epoxy and screwed in through the outer hull and sheer clamp.

The foot rests were removed and will be reinstalled after the hull is painted. 

The sheer clamps need to be planed so that the curved deck lays flush over them. There are two guides that were included in the kit. One has a 24 inch radius for the rear deck and the other has a 16 inch radius for the fore-deck. Several hours and quite a bit of elbow grease later, here is what the aft radius looks like.

Here you can see the increased radius of the fore deck camber.



The area where the cockpit resides is a transition area between the 24 inch radius and the 16 inch radius. A rolling bevel was planed here so that the two angles smoothly blend together.

You can see from the amount of shavings that this process was a lot of work. It also took much longer than I anticipated but the end result was good.  

 A small beam was installed toward the bow. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the piece in my kit so I made one from pine.

A cardboard dam was placed in both the bow and stern and end pours of epoxy thickened with wood flour were made. These will increase the impact resistance of these surfaces.

Next came several test fits before the actual installation of the aft-deck. The plans call for installing both decks at the same time but I decided to do one a day to make the process a little less hectic. After a full day of work I don’t want to make a huge  mistake just because I am over tired!

The underside of the deck was coated with clear epoxy and mustard consistency epoxy glue was applied to the tops of the sheer clamps and bulkheads. The deck was put in place with straps and my son held down the edge while I drove bronze nails three inches apart into the sheer clamps. Small strips of wax paper were placed under the ends of the deck so that later removal of a small segment will be easy to do.

Once the last of the nails were in place the kayak was flipped over so that the epoxy that was running down the sides would resettle into the deck/hull joint.

 

Once 24 hours had passed, the straps were removed from the aft-deck and the fore deck was test fitted. Just as with the aft deck, a coat of clear epoxy was applied to the underside of the fore-deck.

Mustard consistence epoxy was placed over the sheer clamps, beams and bulkheads. The fore-deck was placed with ¼ inch overlap over the aft-deck and strapped into place. Once again bronze nails were spaced three inches apart and my son held the deck down while I hammered them in. A sharp x-acto was run down the aft edge of the fore-deck and into the aft-deck. This trimmed off the ¼ overlap and resulted in a clean butt joint between the deck halves. A small reinforcing block was coated with epoxy glue and clamped under the butt joint.

The fore-deck has substantially more camber to it than the aft-deck so the outboard edge of the plywood wanted to pull up from the sheer clamps. I flipped the boat over and applied blue 3-M masking tape to the edges to pull them down onto the outer edge of the hull.

 

Go to part 4