Adventures in a Mill Creek 16.5

  I have now put eight strips on each side. As I am getting further down the hull, a lot more twist is needed to get them to fit...more clamps, more tape, the occasional screw and one split scarf joint and a few more gaps than before!  After the next layer, I will switch to focussing on one side only, up to the centre line. I can then use the router 'cheat' to make a straight seam.

 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).