Yet More Repairs

In an ideal world, inexpensive cedar boards are knot and damage free and I am rich and good looking. One look at my bank balance, my face, or an inexpensive piece of cedar will tell you it is not an ideal world. And while my looks and riches are hard to change, less-than perfect cedar is not. One way to deal with damaged wood is simply to cut the damaged part out and join the remaining pieces back together. While I had to do that with a few strips on the bottom of the boat, I've avoided it wherever possible. This is especially important since I'm book-matching the strips. If I cut a chunk out of a strip, there will be a break in the pattern.

So what to do when there is ding or a gouge in a strip? Patch it, of course.

The first set of photos illustrates the process for a fairly serious gouge. The following photos show the results from repairing chip-out from some irregular grain.

The two pictures above show the original damage to the strip. This damage is from a gouge that was in the original board that I cut into strips.

The first step is to trim/whittle the gouge as smooth as possible. On small gouges, this can be done with one or two cuts of the knife.

If necessary, sand the gouge smooth. Yes this is the pad from a random orbital sander, and no, I didn't use the sander on this. It was a used pad with enough grit at the edge to do the sanding.

Mark a piece of similarly grained and colored wood in preparation for fitting into the smoothed gouge. For small gouges, a whittled flake of wood works fine. This being a larger gouge, it required a larger scrap of wood.

Whittle and/or sand the scrap so that it fits into the smoothed gouge. Leave it oversized so it is easier to work with.

Glue the scrap into place and either tape or clamp it.

After the glue dries, plane and/or sand the protruding scrap so that it is flush with the edge of the strip. The strip is ready to go.

The two photos above show the process for a chip-out of irregular grain. Yes, I should have spent more time matching the grain direction. However, the color of the patch piece should darken to match the color of the strip and be virtually undetectable in a few weeks.

There are two pieces of advice I've gotten from the Kayak Building Bulletin Board that I try to keep in mind, especially on this, my first boat: 1) It's a boat. Part of the goal is to make something beautiful, but the main goal is to make a functional watercraft. Time spent on trying to make it absolutely perfect is time that won't be spent on the water. 2) Follow the 10 foot rule. Most people will view the boat from at least 10 feet. If it looks good from 10 feet, stick with it. If not, do something about it.

Fixing a Big Gap

I was a little overzealous when trimming the ends of one pair of strips and ended up with a gap of 1/16th of an inch or so. When I fit shavings into it, the grain direction was noticeable, so I decided to make a patch that would match the grain. Here are the steps:

The gap.

I cut small pieces off the end of a strip with matching color. The angle matches the angle where the strips at the gap should meet.

I glued them together so the grain formed a chevron where the two halves of the patch piece meet.

After trimming the patch piece to a size where it fit into the gap, I glued it into place. It stood above the surface of the kayak.

After the glue dried, I sanded the patch flush and the patch is almost invisible.

Filling in Some Gaps

Trimming the ends of the strips where the meet tightly at the keel line is a little, shall I say, challenging. I ended up with small gaps in several places. One way to fix gaps like this is to mix some sawdust with epoxy and use it as a paste. The sawdust/epoxy mixture ends up darker than the original wood, though. So for the larger gaps, I decided to fill them with wood shavings that I made by planing along the edge of a scrap strip. The process is:

1. Create the shavings by planing the edge of a scrap strip with a color similar to those bordering the gap. Trimming it so it is wedge-shaped in cross section may help to fit it in the gap.
2. For a wider gap several shavings can be piled together.
3. Put a little glue on the sides of the shavings.
4. Wedge the shavings into the gap. Note they will likely stand above the surface of the kayak. This is not a problem.
5. After the glue has dried, sand or plane the shavings down so they are even with the surface of the boat.

These photos illustrate the process.

The gap between the ends of the strips where they meet at the centerline.

The shavings used to fill the gap

The gap is filled.

Stripping the Hull

Once I made the correction to the cheater strips, I picked up a lot of speed on stripping the hull. The process for each strip is:

1. Trim strip to approximate length
   
   
2. Use a block plane to put a rolling bevel on the strip being installed. This simply means beveling the edge of the strip so that it meets the edge of the previous strip flat. The angle of the bevel depends on the curvature of the side of the boat. This, of course, changes along the strip depending where on the boat the edge of the strip is.
   
   
3. Cut the end of the strip to the approximate sharp angle it needs to meet the strip on the opposite side correctly.
   
   
4. Use a block plane to trim the ends of the two corresponding strips so they meet properly at the ends.
   
   
5. Apply a bead of glue to the edge of the strip already on the kayak.
   
   
6. Place the strip into place, stapling it to the forms and tightly taping it to the previous strip.
   
   

Anywhere two strips meet, the shaping is done by hand with the block plane. If you trim too far, you end up with a gap. So there's a lot of trim, fit, trim, fit, trim, ...you get the picture. And speaking of getting the picture, here are a few from stripping the hull:

This photo shows the hull stripped just past the chine (the transition from bottom of the boat to the side). The guillemot has a fairly hard chine. Some builders have recommended stripping this portion of the hull using narrower strips to spread the transition at the tight curve. I opted not to do this and it turned out o.k., but if I were to do it again, I would use thinner strips in this area to make fitting the curve easier.

On a couple of the forms at the chine, the strips rose above the form a little. At first I thought that the strips were just following a smooth spline curve and that if I altered the forms by adding a spacer, it would make for a smoother transition at the chine. After a bit of fitting, I discovered that adding the spacer was going to allow the strips to align farther and farther from the form. So, ultimately, I removed the spacers and clamped the strips down to the forms where they were rising up. After a day or two, the strips conformed to the forms with just a staple.

The stern close to where the internal stem ends. This is not a good picture, but if you look close and use your imagination, you can see how the ends of the strips are trimmed in order to meet where they come together.

Looking from the center to the bow as stripping continues. It was about this point in the work when I thought, "I can do this!" You can see a little bit of the concave curve at the bow. Getting that curve correct required some steaming and clamping. Some other builders have failed to get that curve well-defined and attribute difficulty in tracking to the lack of that narrowing at the bow and stern.

Stripping continues. I staple each strip to the forms and use masking tape between the forms to hold the strips tightly together while the glue dries.

Time for the last strips in the hull. Getting them trimmed to fit took a lot of planing and fitting and planing and fitting, but that is the nature of the beast.

The hull is completely stripped! A major milestone.

Next time: mistakes I made on the hull and how I fixed them.

A Drastic Do-Over

When last we left progress on the kayak, I had discussed using cheater strips to allow the strips to go on with less bend and associated stress. This image shows cheaters in place on the bow (note the triangular gap at the point of the cheater strip).


At the stern, I discovered that somehow I had managed to get the spacing of the strips off by about 1/4 inch. So if you looked at the kayak from the end of the bow, a strip on the port side was closer to the keel than the corresponding strip on the starboard. After some close measuring, I found that the cheater strip on the port side was wider than that on the starboard. My choices were 1) to trim the next strip or two on the port side to get the two sides back in line or 2) to take out the cheater, reposition the strips, and then cut and glue in new cheaters. I knew I would be bothered by the mismatch if I didn't go back and line things up. Option 2 it was.

How to remove the cheaters? Well, the wood glue I'm using (Titebond II) is not waterproof. It can be softened with steam. I shielded the strongback and forms with foil to minimize the amount of steam and water that would get on them. I pulled the staples holding the cheaters and adjacent strips. The steam softened the glue. Knife blades, chisels, and wooden wedges provided enough gentle leverage to get the glue to separate. These two images show one of the cheater strips nearly removed (yes, it was a mess).




After the cheaters were out, I peeled off what softened glue I could and trimmed the rest with a sharp chisel.

On the bright side, all this work gave me the idea to get rid of that pesky triangular space that shows up where a cheater tapers out (see the first picture in this post). The solution is to use a hacksaw blade to trim the end of the triangular area so it has a wider, more squared off end. As a result, cheater strips don't have to be tapered impossibly thin at the end. The next three images illustrate this process.