Turns out I found a bunch of photos from when I built the kayak, so figured I’d put them up here. The kayak was built over the winter of 2013/2014, and launched right around September 2014 (yep, I missed the summer - oh well).
The earliest photo I could find of this process was already quite some way through the build - the hull had been tacked together, I’m betting it’d probably already been fibreglassed by this point, and I was planing down the sheer clamps in order to get a rolling curve to match the curvature of the deck plank which was to be attached next.
It generated a ton of really nice pine curls. This makes for great fire starter. Boat building generates a lot of this stuff.
Next up was to put the deck on. I built this particular kayak because I liked the look of the rounded deck as opposed to the harsh “chines”/angles of decks that are built out of multiple pieces. The one drawback of this is that it was quite the operation to get it on and glued.
In the below picture you can more clearly see the nails at regular intervals that were used to help clamp the deck to the sheer while the epoxy dried. These nails are the primary reason why I pushed the hull paint up around the corner and on to the deck for an inch, to hide the nail heads. Note to future builders: you don’t really need the nails at all, just use many many straps cinched around the hull & deck while epoxy drys.
Here’s the classic shot of a bajillion clamps being used (common for boat building), in this case holding the cockpit coaming tight while epoxy sets.
And here’s the boat ready for sanding before hull paint and deck varnish.
Varnish complete!
This is a detail I tried out on this boat - print a design on rice paper (you have to tape the rice paper to a regular sheet of paper to get it to feed through a printer without tearing), then put it down underneath the fibreglass before epoxying. It turned out pretty well, although you can see it moved slightly out of alignment while epoxy was being added to the fibreglass. You can’t really see the edge of the rice paper though unless you’re really looking close.
And the crappy part of this build. I painted the hull first, and varnished the deck second. Well I taped off the edge of the paint, but I didn’t tape all the way down the hull. When varnishing, you have to wet sand between coats, meaning you get this gunky water with varnish crap dripping everywhere.
Well, it dripped down and proceeded to coat the lovely blue hull paint job. I probably could have washed this off if I was a bit more persistant, but instead I sanded the entire hull and put on one more coat of blue paint. All because I didn’t tape up a plastic barrier. Ugh.
And a few pics of the finished kayak. I can report she paddles nicely and has oodles of below deck storage for camping.
