July 30, 2000

My Osprey Standard Kayak kit arrived from Pygmy Boats on January 13, 2000. I am trying to track my progress by capturing images with my toy digital camera, the JamCam 2.0.

The kit came in two boxes. One eight-foot box contains all of the parts and another box contains the gallons of epoxy. All of the wood is mahogany plywood, which is beautiful. I couldn’t resist spreading the deck panels out on the basement floor to get a sense of the overall shape and size. I then packed it up and built a 16-foot table (Tip 1) to be my workbench for the project. I am very fortunate to have a large unfinished basement with windows that will allow me to get the kayak out of the house when it is complete.

This kit is constructed using the "stitch and glue" method. The first step is to glue the panel halves together in the middle to make them the full-length panels that will make up the boat. The panels are labeled by panel number, left or right and bow or stern. This particular boat is made up of 6 panels on each side. You start with all (Tip 1) of the left side panels carefully aligned on the table with wax paper under the joints. When each panel is perfectly positioned, it gets nailed to the table to keep it in alignment during the gluing process. It was really hard to drive the first nail in that beautiful wood, but later in the process I will be drilling over a hundred holes, so big deal. The joint is glued with epoxy and a strip of fiberglass tape is placed over the joint for reinforcement. The white glass tape turns crystal clear when wetted by the epoxy and the wood color darkens. The joint is covered with a strip of Mylar and then bricks are piled on to weight it down during the 24-hour cure.

After the epoxy cures, the bricks and Mylar are removed. You can now see what color the wood will take on when the boat is done and see how the fiberglass completely disappears. Now the joint is smoothed and excess epoxy removed. I have found that a scraper works best. It can remove material much faster than sandpaper and is easy to use if kept sharp. When this side of the joint is prepared, the panels are flipped over and the same thing is done to the other side. Then the whole process is done again for the right side panels. Now I have twelve full-length panels on the floor ready for drilling. You can see that there are very few parts left in the box as of January 22.