Panels Complete

Deck Panels

 This weekend was pretty productive, I just wish it was a day or two longer. I spent Saturday running around town doing the weekly shopping and errands. Saturday afternoon was dedicated to ice fishing for northern pike, of which I did manage to land 3 beautiful fish.
Sunday I expected the weather to be bad so I planned on spending the entire day in the shop. The major tasks for Sunday was to prep all of the panels for stitching  after hours of sanding edges and beveling the edges on the shear line and drilling holes, I think I am finally ready to stitch the hull panels together.
At this point I am willing to mention that the plans and manual from Pygmy boats does leave a bit to be desired. While the instructions and plans are complete, everything is there, they seem to be lacking in more depth and in-site to the project that would make the process a little easier. After spending the majority of my life as a professional draftsman, whoever drew up the plans could have spent a little more time improving readability. Again, the plans are complete, just lacking a bit of style.
Eight hours spent on Sunday, which brings us up to 25 hours so far.... not bad for a first build.

Hull Panels

Mothership

Had a great four day weekend to work on the kayak. It started on Friday with a terrible cold (cough cough ;) and ended Monday with the presidents day holiday. At this point, all of the major pieces have been cut out with the exception of the coaming pieces. I have to admit that i didn't spend every available hour on it. I did manage to go catch a couple of fish, take care of some book work and various other tasks. Cutting out 12 twenty foot long pieces with a jigsaw has not been the most fun task that i have done on this boat so far. that works out to about 480 feet of cutting, no wonder i went through 3 blades.
As of this weekend I hereby dub this kayak the "Mothership" because it is one mother of a big boat.
I added about 10 hours to the project this weekend which brings the total up to 17 hours thus far.

A little more

Made a little more progress this weekend on the kayak. The lofting is now complete, next step is to cut out the pieces and smooth out the final shapes. Then will trace out the shapes on the other panels for the other side, cut and smooth. I would have spent more time on it but we got hit with a blizzard and the shoveling was a lot of fun.

hours spent so far...  7

First steps

The first challenge on this kayak build is putting together long enough panels for the length of the boat. Butt joint two full sheets plus 53 inches of a third. I used a trim bit in the router to true up the edges and with a 3 1/2" brace, I glued the butt joints with epoxy thickened just a bit with wood flour. You can see the weights used to hold everything down while the epoxy cured. A good use for paint cans full of bent rusty nails! With the average temp in the shop around 65 deg, it took almost all of two days for the epoxy to dry. The next big issue was figuring out how to turn the 20ft piece of 1/4" plywood over by myself...not happening.. With the help of the neighbor we got it flipped.
Now I can draw on the sections to be cut out.

Hours spent thus far.... 3