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.

  

The Motivation: Eye Candy

 Boatcraft's display of kayaks is eye candy for anyone who wants a kayak that paddles great, is light and will be loved by family long past the builder's days. 

The Anuri 16, my build for 2024, is the kayak in the middle of the last two photos.

Setup: March 2023, Sawhorse/Cradles

 Son-in-law and grandsons set up their garage for the build. Sawhorses/cradles were 40 inches (approx. 1 metre) high. That was an ideal height to work at when covered with a 2 foot X 8 foot plywood sheet for wiring panels and gluing seams.

Video: Kayak From Boatcraft/Timber Boatworks, Solace 16XL Sept 2023 Cockpit to Stern

I will post photos and comments on complete build.

You can avoid some of my mistakes.
 

Video: Completed Boatcraft/Timber Boatworks Kayak: Solace 16XL, September 2023, Bow to Cockpit

 

Mack D. Male: Using Technology for Public Engagement

Mack D. Male, at MasterMaq.ca

Mack D. Male has important things for you to learn about technology tools and public engagement. 

Mack D. Male is a well know blogger on urban affairs in Edmonton, Canada and a coach on the use of social media tools.

In a presentation to the Alberta Professional Planners Institute, Mack Male covers the technology and processes possible for public engagement. He reviews a number of engagements covering both the positives and pitfalls.

For planners, for politicians, for political scientists and sociologists interested in social media and its impact on public engagement, Mack Male is worth a listen. His presentation is broken down into two 20 minute videos.

As one of Canada's leading advocates of new approaches to urban affairs who walks his talk (see Mack's website on Food Truck's in Edmonton, What the Truck?!), Mack is unique in that he deeply understands the tools and has closely observed and practiced the public engagement arts.

If you want to understand what technology can do in our public discussions, it is worth spending 40 minutes with Mack D. Male

Mack D. Male was chosen by Alberta Venture Magazine in 2010 as one of Alberta’s Next 10 Most Influential People. 

Part 1: Using Technology for Public Engagement



Part 2: Using Technology for Public Engagement

Learning From a MOOC

Growing Insights is now being offered as a online learning course for professional development by the Alberta Professional Planners Institute. 

Growing Insights is our first experiment in doing a MOOC (a Massive Open Online Course). The Alberta Land-use Knowledge Network launched its course on urban agriculture and local food the beginning of November, 2013. The course ran for 4 weeks with four streams, one offered each week. Over 300 people registered for the course during the 4 weeks. We had a week and half of publicity for the course before it opened.

Here is what I learned about MOOCs. There are different versions of these large online courses. The universities have used tools like Coursera and other versions of MOOCs (Here is what Wikipedia says about MOOCs). However, we were trying to do something that matches what George Siemens, Athabasca University, and Dave Cormier, University of PEI, envisioned when they pioneered the term MOOC (What is a MOOC, Dave Cormier).

The idea of MOOCs is a Canadian invention using the Internet to get people together to learn and discuss in a structured but open process.

First, the Alberta Land-use Knowledge Network had two reasons for doing the MOOC. We wanted to try out this new form of active learning. Our job is to deliver good emergent information and research on land-use practices and policy to Albertan land-use planners, agrologists and land reclamation specialists and watershed plan managers. Doing a MOOC seemed to be something we needed to do. Our second reason was that we knew urban agriculture was an emergent issue. Solid Alberta based information was hard to come by even though we knew that emergent expertise and practices were available in Alberta. For example, the City of Calgary has seen its community gardens expand from 11 in 2008 to 140 in 2013. Doing a MOOC was a robust way to develop good information on urban agriculture. 

So here is what we learned:

• Getting new content isn't the problem. Figuring out the course structure and format appropriate to the audience takes time. From the genesis of the idea to the delivery of the course took us over a year. Interviewing experts, assembling and posting content, videos and organizing publicity probably was a concentrated 2.5 month effort by 6 staff.
• Short videos are a great tool to capture expert knowledge and stories. People will view 5 four minute videos in a row. They will not watch a 20 minute video. 
• After doing the video interviews with experts, we had a list of curated links to important content on the Internet. The experts pointed out key enablers for urban agriculture that are not readily apparent even on municipal websites in cities where urban agriculture is emerging. 
• We used Ning for our website. It had the advantage of ease of posting and participant registration. The discussion forum was pretty basic and confusing to follow during and after an online discussion.
• We were not intent on providing a "course". We were intent on providing good information and connection to an emergent community. We achieved the objective of providing good information. The website tool didn't support the community conversation component and as survey respondents pointed out, they were only moderately interested in discussions. But that aspect, always difficult in a new community that hasn't met face-to-face to build the all important community component of trust, is something we didn't achieve.
• The real place for MOOCs to move is to professional development and professional learning. It is not happenstance that the Alberta Professional Planners Institute asked us to retool the GrowingInsights course so that professional planners can earn structured learning credits for their continuous professional learning.

Things that worked (and shouldn't have):

• 300 plus registrations. 300 was my measure for success. A national conference on food security in Edmonton had approximately 200-250 attendees the previous year. But with only a week and half of publicity, I was surprised that we had those numbers by the end of the first week of the course. And the majority of registrants were Albertan, another surprise.
• A survey of participants (only 19 responded) showed that the majority heard about the course by word of mouth. Email was second. 
• Videos worked (if we kept the intro short and the commentary short).
• Most survey respondents thought the course was the right length and quite useful. 
• I was surprised that people checked the daily emails and viewed videos regularly. Most people checked the website a couple of time a week. The importance of "push" rather than "pull" by putting information directly in front of them is a key learning because we initially questioned whether people would get tired (spammed out) by daily emails.
• Our audience had a pretty broad range with 20-29 years being in the majority. We had posited that urban agriculture is important because the Millennials are driving it. The course reflected that.

 So in spite of the demise of MOOCs being broadly broadcast in the latter half of 2013, we have found a niche. We are now working on more MOOC topics (LiDAR anybody?)