A little update

Senior Design is finally over, at least for the next few days until we get feedback. For now I'm mountain biking.

A little playtime between my apartment and campus :) makes for a nice ride to classes!

From mtb

At Lake Crabtree yesterday

From mtb

Sunset at Crabtree

From mtb

That's it for now. Possibly snow biking tomorrow morning!

To Alaska

I'm off to Alaska with the whole family for a week. Here's a short video of us on the first paddle.

Flotation! Finally!

It's been a month of hard work, and tonight we finally took it out for the first test paddle! Verdict: she floats!


There was no leakage either! Tonight definitely had the thrill of satisfaction

Call it, Friendo

We're done! For now at least. We glued the decks on this morning, and then coated the inside twice and let it dry up for a while. It also started raining just as we were cleaning up from epoxying the inside, so we quickly threw the tarps on and ran inside. We didn't have paddles, so we headed up to Dick's Sporting Goods. They have cheap wooden paddles for $30. They actually look really good, and should hold up for a while.

The sun was shining when we got back from the store, so we decided to go ahead and flip the boat, and apply the last coats to the bottom of the hull. Just as we were finishing up, we were hit by another downpour. We put the tarps up again, probably in the best configuration yet. It's basically a really big tent that's staked out over the whole boat. I'll get some pictures up later tonight.

We're going to let the epoxy cure for two days, then go for a test paddle/fishing trip on Tuesday night. We would probably do it tomorrow night, but our grandma's birthday is then, so no go.

Getting there...

Alright so now it looks like a canoe!

It's got seats! We took apart old folding lawn chairs that have these sweet teal webbing in them. We built a box frame for the seats, and then wrapped and stapled the webbing to the frames.

This is the storage bucket in the stern bulkhead. It has a nice lid that's hinged. We still have to put the decking on, but this is pretty much what the rear will look like.

Another look after the gunwale clamps came off today. We put the rest of the gunwales on first thing this morning, then took the clamps off around 6. The canoe doesn't look straight or square in this picture, but it is... somewhat.

Nice, level gunwales. Tomorrow we install the decks on top of the bulkheads, which we've cutout already, then coat the boat in epoxy! Almost done! It might get a float test tomorrow :)

Gunwales

Yesterday we installed one side of the gunwales, and the bulkheads. In some of the pictures below you can see the rectangular cutouts in the bulkheads. These are for the hatches we are installing for storage.

We thought we could install all of the gunwales, but we didn't realize how many clamps it would take, and how few clamps we actually had! Will install the rest tomorrow.


We also tried to make an end pour at the front, for installing a rope handle. The directions we have make a poor suggestion of making the end pour 'frame' out of cardboard and taping it in place. Bad idea! The large amount of epoxy melted the tape, and started to leak out into the nose of the boat just in front of the bulkhead! DOH! It turned out to be a huge waste of epoxy, but we did manage to scoop some of it up and onto the sides of the hull that need to be covered in epoxy anyway.

Frames In

A rope around the hull to keep it tight


We filleted the frames to the hull with wood filler, then fiberglass taped them.







We've got an idea to implement some buckets with lids into the bulkheads. The lids will almost be flush with the bulkhead. I'll get some pictures of them tomorrow once they're sanded down. We need ideas for seats! Nylon webbing or something else??

Stitching done

I didn't get a chance to post what we did on Thursday. After we had glued the seams and waited for them to cure, we had taken out the stitches. Once these were out, we sanded the seams down to nice curves, and then fiberglass taped two of the four seams. We were running out of time before we got to the last two seams. Our dad has been helping out lately, too. He's always wanted a canoe, so I think he's hurrying along so he can ride in it! Sorry, no pictures, this was a messy night.

Completion of stitching and hull tack welding

We worked well into the night, about 11pm. Long night, and we even got started early...


Stitching the frames on, now you can see the curves of the canoe.


Frames in place now.


Putting the top panel on. We decided it would be easier to stitch the ends of the top panels together, then spread them and start stitching from the middle out to the tips.




Check it out! we've got a canoe!


View from on top of the deck.


Gettin kind of dark...


Here we're putting the epoxy/wood filler mix into the seams. This is the 'tack welding' process. Once these dry, we can take the stitches out and fill in their holes.

Back under the tarps for the night

Stitching

Tonight we moved the workshop outside since the basement windows/doors are too tight to get the canoe out once assembled. We threw together a simple table instead of saw horses, and it's a lot sturdier.

It looks like a canoe! Almost there... It's curved downward in this picture, and obviously it's supposed to curve the other way. That's because the side panels aren't pushed out as far as they will be in the end, and the wood needs to be pushed out at an angle, hard to do when you're air-paddlin.

It was getting pretty dark, we didn't make much progress because we had to build the table, too. We usually start around 7, right after dinner, which doesn't give us much time. I need to start going to work earlier and getting off before 5.

We finished up around 9:30 tonight. The flood lights in the backyard don't provide too much light, and some of the bow is in the shadow of the deck. Also, it's not supposed to rain for at least a week, but we put two tarps over it just in case. We don't need any bird poop on it.

A bit mo work

Ok, so I've been out of town the past weekends/weeks on vacation and such, so we haven't had a chance to get some quality work knocked out. The other night we glued the panels together, then fiberglassed over the seems.

These panels are looong
I'm about to head down and pull off the plastic to see how well we fiberglassed the seems.

Tomorrow we are planning on starting to stitch the hull together! We have to move our operation outside, though, because the canoe, once built, won't be able to fit through any of the windows or doors in the basement. We're going to setup a large tent in the backyard to work under, and hopefully you will see this thing floating soon!

More work

We got a lot of work done on the canoe today. We finished tracing all the parts onto the plywood, then started cutting them. It took us a good 4 hours to do all the cutting, ugh. It was a hot day, too, but it was fun.

The builders, the brothers

Matt stopped by so we could borrow his saw horse, which turned out to be about 2 ft. high. Not good for two guys over 6ft tall, haha.

A lot of "This one goes over here" "Uhhh no we should cut like this"


Something was funny here...


First injury, bro had to get a kiss from mommy before continuing.




Haha, woops, too heavy for the swing seat


Finishing up before the sun sets, it looks like a canoe! kinda.. maybe?


Well you just have to add the rest of these parts.

A New Adventure

My brother and I started talking about building a canoe for over a year. It finally began tonight. Apparently being at school puts a dent in your hobbies.

We're building a 18' canoe from some free plans we found online. It's called the DK Touring Canoe. Just google the name and you can see the basic shape of it. For now, it looks like this:

It uses a stitch and glue technique, and fiberglass tape on the seams. Since my brother and I are cheap, we just bought exterior plywood, not marine plywood. We are planning on being very careful when epoxying, to get the whole boat encased in epoxy, so the type of wood shouldn't matter. I've had enough experience with epoxy, so I don't think will be too bad.
Last weekend I was in Raleigh, and picked a windsurfer mast from a friend and drove it up with my civic. It's actually the last mast from the set of 3 of Team RAF's boats of the EC.

After the canoe is finished, we'll make a bracket to clamp onto the gunwales for the mast, like the other sailing canoes around.

We got back from getting the wood around 8:30 tonight, and drew up all the reference lines and one of the bottom sections by 9:30, then my brother had to go to sleep. More to come on the weekend!

Rider 629: DNF

DNF = did not finish... These two pieces are supposed to be connected together

Obviously my bike is not as extreme as me.

The Cohutta 65 went down like this. I missed the start of the race by about 3-4 min because the clock on my speedometer was off by a few minutes. I lined up near the middle of the pack with the 35-milers, but soon realized this was the wrong starting pack. I made my way through them and sprinted up the first climb of the race. This climb was about 900ft up over 3 miles. I caught up with the back of the pack as we hit the top of the mountain and entered the singletrack.

This is where I made my first mistake. I assumed the line of people I was behind was the main pack. I could not see far enough ahead because of the mist and twisty trail to see where I stood at this point. I figured it was just a long line of riders so I did not bother passing anyone for the next ~8miles. At this point, the 35milers started catching up, and I realized I was just behind a pack of very slow riders. Once we were on a straight section I finally passed them all and took off. This is where the battle really began.

We crossed the river and hit the more technical singletrack. At about 15 miles in my legs were not feeling great, I hadn't really eaten or drank anything. I also noticed that one of my bottles of cytomax had jumped out, probably on some of those huge 4" roots down by the river. I had only about 45 minutes of fuel left in my remaining bottle. I'm hoping that 1st aid station comes up quickly...

Some of the scenery
With a bad front derailleur, the single part of the singletrack was fairly tough stuff. Wet roots made the climbing worse, but I only had to dismount 2 times in the first 18 miles. At the top of the single track climb was aid station #1. I took about 3 minutes to rest because my legs were cramping up, I didn't have much time to drink on the single track sections. My nutrition plan for this race was already falling behind :(

From then on out to where I got the mechanical failure was all fire roads. My speedometer was also working intermittently, so I didn't have a great idea of when the next climb was coming other than by attacking it when it came. I started taking down the nutrients after mile 18 and started feeling great. I made up huge time on the climbs, which is somewhat surprising because I didn't have my granny gear to use. Remember? I'm running 1x9 in this race.

I rolled through aid station #2 (I think it was 2...) and spent the next few miles by myself. I thought I had taken a wrong turn. Anyway, I didn't expect the next climb. I suffered through it, but caught up to another rider at the top. I was glad to see another racer. Turns out he's from Cary and rides the same local trails as me. Small world... We stayed together for the next ~3 miles until we got to station #3. He got out of there quickly, and shot down the next few downhills. He was faster on the downhills, but I caught up to him and flew past on the climbs. This was on the next big climb at mile 33. This was a ~700ft climb over the next 3 miles. At the top of this climb I was spinning out the legs minding my business when it happened.

A small stick got lodged in my rear derailleur, pushed into the spokes of the wheel, and the rest is history. The wheel locked up before I knew what happened and lurched me off the bike. The derailleur was sticking straight up, towards my seat. Ugg. Curse words ensued....

I pulled the derailleur out of the wheel, and it broke right off. There not much I could do. I thought about converting to single speed, I had a chain tool and everything, so I lined up the chain but it didn't look like the right tension. So I started hoofing it back to aid station #3. Mind you this down the mountain and across a gap about 5 miles back. At least I could roll downhill...

Dave from Scott's Bikes was awesome help back at the station. Unfortunately he didn't have a derailleur I could throw on. He said the sweep rider was coming through after the last rider and I could see if he had the part I needed.

Waited 1.5 hours or so, I lost track of time.

Nope, don't have the part, but did have a power link. Dave was bored and I let him mingle with my bike and the power link, and he got a mediocre chain tension, but the wheel axle was not really in the dropouts.

I tried riding it for ~.5 mile, but it was skipping all over the place. I walked back to the station to receive a DNF...

Disappointing, yes. The ride back was what made it though. I rode in the back of Dave's pickup in a recliner patio chair taking pictures of riders we passed on the way back. I saw some familiar faces from when I had to walk my bike back. But, I recognized one from TV. Floyd Landis, 2006 Tour de France winner for the non-bikers out there, was racing a nice Mooto-x. Baller!

He said he wanted to ride in the truck, and I said back to him "Break your bike like I did. Or, I can ride your bike for you!" He chuckled and kept riding up the hill. Cool dude, made my day :)

I did not get to ride his bike though.

I asked Dave from Scott's Bikes to send me some pics of me and Landis, expect those soon. Getting a used X-9 derailleur tomorrow to get back on the bike. Also need another spoke

It was a muddy ride, too. Thunder-stormed the night before the race, still a happy rider though.

Suckers. I got a "Finisher!" mug even though I rode in on a truck

363 days to stare at this mug and earn it for real....