Building a kayak in an art gallery

Hi, welcome to my blog about painting, boats, art, and living in a small town in coastal Maine. I meant to start this blog some time ago, before I started building my kayak. Now I have a lot of people asking how the boat building is going so I thought I'd really better get the blog going so they can check it out.

I am building a Pygmy Coho kayak. I'm building it it our art gallery because it's the only large heated area I have to work in. The gallery, Isalos Fine Art, is open, but this is a slow time of year for us in Downeast Maine. The first step to building the boat was to get the gallery moved around, build a table, gather tools and set up the boat building area. Lucky for me, our neighbor had a huge crate he was taking to dump that just happened to be convertible to a seventeen and half-foot table (the kayak is just over 17 feet).

Here's Michael taking the crate apart.

We put paper down to protect the floor.

The table looked like such a good work surface that I had to spend a few days stretching canvases.

With a good stock of canvases ready I can now start building the kayak. The Coho is a kit that comes from Pygmy in two boxes. One box containes the epoxy and small bits, the other forty pieces of wood that will become the kayak. I am the third owner of the kit and it is now five years old. I was a little worried that the epoxy might be too old or a few pieces missing. But a phone call to Pygmy assured me the epoxy would be OK, and an inspection of the box found all the bits and pieces there - and evidence that a mouse had inspected it at some time too.

Just out of the box.

All accounted for.

The first step is to epoxy the panels together. The hardest part was finding enough heavy things to weigh it down.

In addition to the constuction manual, I am looking at Kayaks You Can Build by Ted Moores and Greg Rossel. It's a great book and has good photos. They build three kayaks and one is the Coho. But they do put it together a little differently than the construction manual, so at each stage I read both and decide which way I am going to put it together. I did take the book's suggestion to build the cradles for the boat to rest on. I 'm really glad I did this even though it took me an extra day.

The first panels sitting in the cradle.

After glueing all the panels together I drilled holes every six inches. My parents came to visit around this time; my Dad, who really wants to build this boat, got a few hours of helping time in. We built a jig to measure the holes (using the metal strapping from the crate that became the table), drilled some holes and cut and bent wires in preperation for stitching it all together. Unfortunatley, one of the panels broke apart and had to be reglued so they weren't here for the exciting part when it starts to look like a boat.

More panels and temporary frames that help direct the shape.

The hull from the stern looking foward.

Our cat, Wendell, checks it out.

The hull gets turned over. At this point the whole thing is held together by wires. I check to make sure it is straight and the panels line up before the epoxy is put in the seams.

Wow !