Blog - reboot!

I'll leave the posts below for posterity, and so that you know that I'm a real person and that delays are inevitable with a combination of time, young children and the necessity to rebuild the garage before I could start, but anyway, I'm restarting this blog now that I'm actually making proper progress!

The wood arrived in December just after Christmas.  A word of warning to those of you who want to buy marine ply for a kayak.  First, make sure you do actually buy Marine Ply not regular, or the whole project will have been for 'nowt before you start as you haven't taken it seriously :).

The other thing is that the wood for the Chesapeake 16 is 4mm thick (not that many other boats are a lot thicker) and you need to find somewhere to purchase it and deliver it.  That 2nd point is important because you don't want to be carting 4mm ply on your roofrack as this is an 8ft x 4ft board that is going to break if you have much windage on it going down the road.  In terms of marine ply orders, a kayak doesn't qualify as a particularly huge order, so make sure the guys you buy it from are happy to deliver it.  This will be great peace of mind when you don't have to play with roofracks and damaging your wood and you can simply accept or not accept the order when it arrives direct to your home :).

I was lucky enough to get my wood from a place called Bamptons where they did deliver and gave helpful advice about the wood types and what to do.  Highly recommended if you're in the Solent area in the UK.  I have 3 x 4mm full boards (8ft x 4ft) and 1 x 6mm half board (4ft x 4ft) plus 10ft lengths of spruce for the sheer clamps (the thin strips of wood that run around the inside top edge of the kayak to hold the deck on).

Ok - I'd already repeatedly digested the plans so I was pretty familiar with how to get started (as I mentioned before, it was great to be forced to read before starting because the temptation is to get down and dirty and one thing I want to make sure is I don't rush and mess things up here).

Job 1: Rip 2 of my 8ft x 4ft (4mm) boards into 11inch wide panels.  I used another piece of wood (an 8ft contiboard shelf actually) as a guide to run my circular saw down.  Measure 15 times, cut once :).  This was actually quite a moment for me, because this definitely left me with the thought "thats it, I've started, I've made some sawdust!".  I've then got 8ft x 11inch long blank panels.  There was then a pause as the epoxy hadn't arrived due to a mix up at the shippers, so I'll pause here too!