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??