Layout: First Days, The Things You Must Pay Attention To

 

Boxes with panels/fiberglass are 8 feet long. Box of supplies, expoy resin and hardner, is about 1.5 X 1.5 X 1.5 feet. Very compact and easy to handle. 

Check the box's inventory. The manual tells you to start there. We found nothing missing but the process familiarized us with the pieces and how they fit together.

IMPORTANT POINT: When you lay the panels out for the first time, the manual  tells you to mark the panel's tabs which mark the locations where bulkheads and frames will be placed. We sanded a few off before marking them. It wasn't the end of the world. Other panels were marked for that frame. But it made placing frames inside the kayak more problematic than it should have been.

 READ THE MANUAL BEFORE YOU START. Particularly read the section you will be working on before you start that work. 

View the Timber Boatworks videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@timberboatworks 

The manual and the numerous videos are very detailed and if you follow them diligently, you will stay out of trouble. More importantly, the quality of your build will begin to match the eye candy in the Boatcraft store. READ THE MANUAL.

Boatcraft/Timber Boatworks have done an excellent job of detailing the build for their kayak kits in their manual and their videos. When I messed up, it was primarily because I had not followed the manual's instructions to the letter.  

STARTING OUT: The manual starts you off by building the kayak's seat. It serves as an intro project to the entire kayak build.  You can make mistakes on the seat and recover from them. Because of its shape, it looks like an intricate build (but it really isn't that hard). And by its completion, you will have mastered some motor skills you will use full on during the hull and deck assembly and fiber-glassing. 

It is recommended that you pick up 6 inch safety wire twist pliers. Princess Auto has them at a reasonable price. You will do so much wire twisting that these will become your primary tool. You will use needle nose pliers often as well so have those too.

The other tool to get is a soldering iron. You will find it essential when removing wire stitches after gluing panel seams and bulkheads. You can try pulling the wires out with pliers but if they don't come with the first two or three tugs, heating the wire with the soldering iron saves your hands and avoids tear-outs. You should stop injecting epoxy in panel seams an inch or two away from the stitching wire. But epoxy runs, hands shake and at bow and stern, you want those seams glued solid before you remove wire stitches. So you will use the soldering iron often and speed up the dewiring process.

The manual recommends bevel sanding the inside edge of panels once you start to wire panels together. (See last picture). IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING, you might save yourself some time by bevel sanding all the hull panels before starting assembly. THAT ASSUMES that you know the difference between the inside and the outside of the hull (not easy at the panel stage). Make sure you know the difference; DOUBLE CHECK. OR you could be smart and follow along the steps as outlined in the manual.

Since the panels come in 8 foot lengths, they have be joined  to get panels 16 feet long. Timber Boatworks cuts their panels carefully with a CNC router. The panels are precision cut to exact lengths. And they have a patented puzzle joint that makes it impossible to join the wrong panels together. If you are having to force panels together, STOP.

You are not as pretty and as smart as you think you are. STOP and check whether you are putting the right panels together. STOP and read the manual to see which panels join to which panels and how they should join. STOP and watch the videos on how to join panels. Panels are cut from quality mahogany plywood, they are cut precisely and they go together reasonably easily but precisely. 

Finally, get a container of acetone. You will drip epoxy often and you want to remove it quickly before it soaks in where it should not be. This is especially true when filling joints and seams with a wood flour/epoxy mixture. If you don't remove it before it sets you have a blotch that can only be removed by sanding. My skills with an orbital sander were not great and I over-sanded some blotches down to the underlying layer on the mahogany plywood (creating a worse blotch). I wish I had know about the acetone before I started using the epoxy. I would have had a prettier build. Rona was the cheapest place for acetone.