Cutting

Mike got called back to work today for a couple of hours.








So I took a couple of hours to cycle down to Long Beach and drink coffee on the rocks.








A small fishing boat went by.















On my way back to the land I saw some flowers that looked a little like the ones around Fritz's house that I cannot identify (it's a domesticated plant, I don't know my domestic plants very well at all). So I took one home to identify. At first I thought it was burdock, but it has no burrs, it turns out to be knapweed (Centaurea, probably Centaurea jacea). Funny that a very pretty domestic flower would be related to or descended from a common weed.

An Amanita muscaria has popped up in the path to my house. Also known as Fly Agaric. Poisonous or hallucinogenic, depending on your point of view. I think it is kind of pretty.

Mike brought his jigsaw and Ruth's kayak to use as a reference for how to proceed. We laid Ruth's kayak on the grass outside the Garden House and examined and measured its coamings and hatches, then we examined and measured the various pieces of plywood we had on hand. We picked a couple of pieces for the coamings and another for the bulkheads.

I check the rear bulkhead template that I made and adjust it to fit behind the cockpit, taping its upper and lower parts together. Then I trace it onto some thin birch plywood and cut it out with the jigsaw. It fits neatly.

There are two coamings, one on each side of the cockpit. Each coaming consists of two parts, a thicker lower piece and a thin upper piece which will be the lip that the kayak skirt must fit over. Using Ruth's kayak as the template, we draw the upper coamings on a thin piece of plywood and I cut them out with the jigsaw. Mike takes one of the thin coamings that I cut out and uses that as a template to draw the two thick pieces.

Mike said we could cut out the hatches any time now. This will freak you out, he said. I asked how we started the cut, and after a bit of experimenting we decided that you start the cut by tipping the jigsaw forward, turning on the blade and then slowly tipping it back to let the tip of the blade pierce the wood.

Mike poises the saw over the kayak and asks if I want him to start the cut. I hesitate and he says, Told you it would freak you out. Somehow cutting the kayak after all the work of glassing and gluing it just seems wrong. I say, Yes go ahead. So he starts cuts for both hatches. Mike takes the wood for the lower coamings over to Peter's to cut on his bandsaw and I finish cutting out the two hatches. I need to use the respirator because of all the epoxy dust.

Now I can reach the place where the forward bulkhead will be, and my template no longer fits there, the kayak has changed shape since I drew it. So I will need to redo the template before I can cut out that bulkhead.

Mike returns, Peter's bandsaw is not there so he cannot cut the coamings on it. Mike changes the blade on the jigsaw and cuts out the lower coamings with the jigsaw. It takes quite a while to do. When he is done we call it quits, it is supper time.

Over supper I make a list of the steps remaining to do. It looks like I am now down to seven days instead of fourteen nights. Finally some progress! However, I didn't know whether I needed to glass the bulkheads and thigh supports or not.

After supper I go over to Mike and Ruth's and we take another look inside Ruth's kayak. Yes, I need to glass everything. And further, I also need to glass tape the joins between the bulkheads and the kayak.

So it might be more than seven days, but surely not fourteen!