Adventures in a Mill Creek 16.5

 Fixing the strips to the hull is now underway. Here is the forth one on the port side going on.

 With all the knots in my whitewood, I will be doing a lot of scarf joints. To make this as easy as possible I have made a little jig for my bandsaw that cuts the strips with a 1 in 8 slope. Its just an angled fence and some toggle clamps to make things quick and easy. Once the scarfs are cut on the two ends, I am joining them using a 3d printed guide. This is made from PETG as this has poor adhesion to pva based wood glue (I am using Titebond original), so I don't need to use bits of polythene all over the place. The method seems to work very nicely. I had also tested (and rejected) using a router or a disk sander to make the scarfs. In my hands both these methods gave untidy joints, and made too much dust and noise.

I've started construction of the kayak. The first job was to make a batch of wood strips (6mm x 20mm). Rather than buy cedar strips (which would have cost about £500), I have made my own by milling down 'whitewood' from Wickes. I bought twenty  18mm x 44mm x 2400mm pieces which each yielded four strips after two table saw cuts and a run through a thicknesser. They are quite knotty, so I may come to regret being a cheapskate. I will remove any bad knots and join smaller pieces together with scarf joints. I made the forms from plywood, and the strong-back is a straight piece of  ' two by four', also from Wickes. The fittings to attach the forms to the strong-back were designed in Openscad and 3D printed. Here is the assembled form, lit by green laser light from a level finder (to help get everything lined up nicely).  

I have decided to build a second boat (strip-built). I like the mill creek double, but it is very big and difficult to manhandle on my own. The new kayak will be designed with the following factors in mind: short enough, and light enough for me to lift onto a car roof, and in and out of the water. I am aiming for a length of 12 foot 6 inches (375cm), and a weight of 15 - 18kg. Room for my feet (size 12), and me 6 foot 2 inches and 95kg, and a bit of 'lunch' (say 10kg) nice and stable, but not too sluggish. Tracking well without a skeg or rudder. not too expensive to build I have done the design in some freely available software (Kayak Foundry), and have arrived at the following: A few other design points: No deck hatches. I intend to store 'lunch' behind the seat. Two removable bulkheads - one at the front which will also provide a support for footrests, and one well behind the seat to create a watertight chamber for buoyancy. Deck lines with flush fittings 3D printed. ...

  Tested out the new seat position on the canal at Tring. It worked really well!

  I fitted a set of seat runners in the middle, and added a set of bolts to move the front set of foot pedals aft for solo paddling. I also repainted the hull to remove all the scratches from the bottom of the river Wye!