The Two Shall Become One

After all the progress in the previous post, it was time to join the two halves of the kayak together!!

This process is a bit tedious – especially for a beginner like me!! A number of little mistakes kind of came to a head at this point.  Getting the two halves to line up “perfectly” was a real challenge.  This was due to the fact that I had not been careful enough when fiberglassing and ensuring that everything was snug up against the forms.  So… lesson learned.

With some effort, I did get it matched up. Here it is all taped together.

The next fiberglassing task was to join the two halves at the inner seam.  I masked off as much as possible prior to joining the halves. A really long strip of fiberglass three inches wide is used on the inside. I wet this out on the table, rolled it up, plopped it inside the kayak and rolled it out.

Just how does one roll out that strip from the cockpit hole without having arms that are eight feet long??

The answer is a brush on a stick!  Of course!! This is a tip from the designer Nick Schade in his book The Strip Built Sea Kayak (link to that book on Amazon). Look closely at the stick standing on end in the following photo – there is a brush on the end!  What an invention!!!

After a bit of time for the epoxy/fiberglass to cure, the plastic is removed and it looks like this!  The first photo is looking aft towards the stern.  The little dohicky sticking up is the skeg box.

Next is looking forwards towards the bow. The bolts (studs) are for the foot rests and there is a plastic tube over them. That plastic is to protect the threads so I don’t get a bunch of epoxy on them. It’ll be removed after the dirty work is complete.

The two halves are most definately one now. Completely inseparable no matter what – just like a marriage!

Hah!! (a little divorcee humor there…)

The next trick is to make the outside split line completely invisible. I’ll get into the details of that in the next post.