Finishing and lashing the frame

All the parts of the frame are made and fitted.  Now it's time for finishing work and lashing it all together.



The cockpit coaming will be on the outside of the skin so it gets lots of coats of varnish.



I don't have two long slim boards for the floorboards but I do have four pieces of slim scrap half the length I need left over from making paddles.  Some passes through the planer make them a consistent thickness.  Then a scarf joint and some epoxy and I have two nice floorboards.



A final pass checking the ends of all the pegs and tenons.  If they aren't quite flush and smooth, fix that.



Now it's time to lash it all together!  Some quality time with clamps and tape measure gets all the hull stringers in just the right place.

Right now, there is nothing but a bit of friction holding the ribs into the gunwales.  With the boat upside down like this, if I grab the keel and lift, the deck drops right off...  Eventually the skin will hold the boat together, but I'd like a little more certainty than that.

  

So the first set of lashings start by going around a deck beam on one side, up the associated rib with a knot every time it crosses a stringer, through the keel, down the other side of the rib, and finishes up around the other end of the deck beam.  With all those in place, I can now lift the frame up and the deck stays with the hull!

 

Now to go lengthwise along each hull stringer.  Start at the aft-most rib next to a hull stringer.

 

Pull off enough synthetic sinew (waxed nylon) to go the length of the stringer (the length of the boat) PLUS enough to tie a knot at every rib on the way by!

 

Then wrap the whole length of sinew up on a short stick.  This both holds the sinew and gives me a nice handle for getting good tension on each knot as I go.  The sinew gets nicely tied off when it reaches the bow-most rib.  Even with the stick, my hands are pretty sore by the time I've done all 344 knots.



Finally, the single deck stringers on top get lashed on at the bow, stern, and each deck beam.  Once they are in place, the frame is done!!!!

Note that the cockpit coaming is just sitting in place to make sure it will fit.  It will eventually be lashed directly to the skin.

Two last little details.  The sides of the cockpit coaming will need to rest on little supports that are a bit tricky.

  

The skin will wrap around the outside of the frame and then come up inside of the coaming.  So the supports will be lashed to the frame at the bottom and will be lashed through the skin to the coaming as the very last step.



The frame is done so now it's time for the big question: Will the boat fit up the bulkhead?

YES!  With room to spare even.



Before skinning, the wood is coated with a penetrating oil that will preserve it when it gets wet.



The smell of the oil is certainly penetrating!  The frame gets to stay outside for a few days until the oil has completely dried.  Of course, the weather turns rainy and the oil is supposed to dry before it gets water on it, so it's a good thing we have a long roof overhang.

The final step is to put the skin on.  I have received all the materials, so now all I need is some nice warm weather.

Cockpit coaming

Well, this took a while.  I didn't have a piece long enough to to the coaming in one go, so I used the strips I cut (way back in January!), scarfed the ends so I could join them, wrapped them around a form, and epoxied them together.

The first step was to make the form.  I had the measurements from the last time I did a sit-test on the frame, so first I made a paper pattern.  This was made easy by using a piece of my wife's dress-pattern paper that has a 1 inch grid on it.

 

I needed a way to make clean curves.  Luckily I had a test rib that had just the right sharp curves and an extra rib blank that bent nicely for gentle curves.  I did one side and then folded it in half and cut both sides together.  (Then realized I'd forgotten to show the marking process and staged these pix)

   

Transferring to plywood was easy.  So was cutting it out on the band saw.



Finally I drew a line 1 1/2 inches in from the edge and used a hole saw in my drill to make places to put clamps all around the edge.  I don't scuba-dive any more so my dive weights have migrated to the work shop.  A dive weight worked nicely to keep the plywood from spinning around when the hole saw caught.

I needed a nice smooth wedge on both ends of each strip so I could scarf them together.

 

This simple jig with a wedge at the right angle and a bit of scrap to support the strip let me use the jointer to trim the angle.  Biggest problem was figuring out how to hold the jig together while doing the trimming.  Look at that nice sloped cut - and all of them came out at precisely the same angle!



The copper pan I used for the ribs was too short, so I hot-glued a foam trough and lined it with plastic. The first step was to soak the strips overnight.


Then dump the cold water out.  I made the end removable specifically so the trough can be emptied.

 

I boiled up a big pot of water on the kitchen stove, poured it in the trough, covered and let steep for 5 min. With the cover off you can see the steam rising.  Another convenient dive weight holds the strips under water. Note that the plastic both made it water-tight and kept the hot water from melting the hot-glue.



Then I put on some gloves and used pretty much every clamp I owned wrapping the strips around the form.

After letting the strips sit for a couple of days, I took the clamps off, put a strip of waxed paper around the form, and had a horrible time epoxying them all together.  My fault - I had a hard time finding waterproof clear epoxy in medium sized containers.  I didn't want to buy either little box-store two-part syringes (would have needed a stack of them) or quart cans that would have been mostly wasted.  Finally found some medium sized bottles but skipped over the fact that they were 5 minute epoxy.  It harded faster than I could get everything clamped together.



That got the tall part of the coaming done (here partly trimmed up).  Now I needed to do the outside rim that the spray skirt will hook over.  I just happened to have several left over rib blanks that are the perfect size.  (I had made extra 'cause I expected some to break while bending - but none did!)



They are too small for the jig so I used my plane to make nice wedge-shaped ends for scarfing.

 

Another round of heating, bending, letting sit, gluing and I'm ready to do the final shaping.

 

Smooth up the top and bottom with the plane and round the edges with the spoke-shave.



Finish up with scraper, file, and sand-paper.  I guess it's not bad for my first laminating job.  I could wish for better but I'm not going to do it over.



It sits perfectly on the edges of the deck beams.

The final two frame pieces are the the two deck stringers (the two pieces down the middle on top). Then a some finishing work and lash the whole thing together!

Thigh Braces

Aleutian kayaks are high-volume cruising boats.  This means that you've got more leg room and can move around a bit.  However, as a Greenland kayaker, I expect to be able to press my thighs against the underside of the deck and have positive contact (be "locked in") for good control when rolling.

I don't know how easy it will be to roll this baidarka, but I am certain that if I am flopping around loosely inside, it's going to be near impossible.  Which I don't like.

The solution is simple - thigh braces.  On a fiberglass sea kayak these would be molded in as the forward part of the "keyhole" cockpit.  In my case, since I had to replace the deck beam in front of the cockpit when I moved it, I designed the new beam to have supports to take the braces.



This is what they look like all finished.  Now let's see how I get here.

I already have convenient mortises in the gunwales, left over from the deck beam I removed.

The braces should be thin and strong.  I just happen to have some scraps of oak kicking around...

  

The bit of oak just needs some work.

  

And there we go, two lovely boards of just the right size.



Then some creative sketching and cutting on the band saw.

I need to create a socket on the underside of the deck beam to take the forward end of the thigh brace. This is why I've haven't pinned the beam in place yet.

 

I want the brace to lock into the deck beam so this calls for some careful carving of the underside of the deck beam.

 

Then the deck beam has to be cut at just the right angles in just the right place.  Catch-22 - I can't accurately mark it until it's finished and in place...  So cut a bit large, test fit, trim, test, shave with the chisel, test...



And it fits perfectly!  Well, the deck-beam mortise is horizontal and the brace is slanted, so that's not as pretty as it could be.  If I do another one someday...

Next up - bending the cockpit coaming!