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Frej XS

Thanks for the suggestion David. I'd rather not have to worry about the durability of the colour choice though and want to keep moving forward. Getting Transtint dyes in Canada involves ordering out of the US plus a few weeks shipping wait. It somehow also involves tripling the price to cross the border? I have an order of fiberglass arriving next week from Composites Canada. That order has 21 yards of BGF 6522 4oz x 30” S-Glass and a 50 yard of 2" 6oz tape for this boat and I'd like to be ready to go. So while I loved the look of the wood... I now really appreciate my dust collector with the internal bag plus HEPA filter on the exhaust.
 

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So like AC/DC we're "Back in Black"

I've read in multiple places that to help achieve a light weight boat you should do a thin epoxy seal coat to prevent the wood from sucking up excess epoxy. Seeing as I'm trying to achieve a black hull I decided to mix in some 423 as this stage. When I bought the materials from Rod in 2015 he advised me not to apply the graphite to the epoxy during the initial wet out to ensure I'm laying flat. That leaves me 2 fill coats to ensure decent coverage. Well I tried to put on a thin coat on today but wound up a little thicker than I wanted in areas as the pot life ended. I'll sand it all down next week for mechanical bond. Thanks again for the "head's up" Mick.
 

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Well I'm not happy, but you sure do a quick turn-around so that's comforting.
 
I'll be honest and admit that it stung a bit to do that. Even my daughter had some comforting words about the black "also" looking good. This boat will be judged in smiles per mile though and not how good it looks sitting in the shade.
 
Sanded down with 80 grit saphir tonight for glassing tomorrow.
 

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Well the glass is wet out and laying flat. I did the glass the way Rod shows and used a squeegee. Being a rookie I made a quite a mess and I'm sure wasted a lot of epoxy. Fill coat coming up soon.
 

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Fill coat covering nicely. I used a west systems roller to apply the fill coat. It worked very well to lay on a uniform thickness. I added 2.25 Tsp graphite powder for every 4oz of epoxy.
 

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My wife has been helping me glass today. We snuck out for a ski between fill coats this afternoon since we have strangely warm weather. I was planning on putting on a third thin fill coat at 22:00 tonight but plans change. After the two fill coats I've done I have good black coverage but screwed up a couple of spots. Can't seem to get a picture that shows the low spots. Instead of another thin coat I'll instead finish sand and then spot repair. Hopefully there won't be a halo around the repairs.
 

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After shaving the glass off the stems I popped the kayak off the forms to trim the glass edge while the epoxy was still green. It was pretty hard to do and keep it clean since it had hardened too much. I made a bit of mess of it. I planed my sheer strip on a 45 when I first started. In future I would leave it square to have a thick guided edge to trim the glass along and then plane it down after. I used my pencil grinder with a burr tip to grind out the inner stems. It worked pretty well reaching in there. The rest of my time today was spent scraping and sanding the inner hull to prep for glass.
 

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It's really starting to look like a boat now! I am loving the detailed pictures.

A joy to follow along and see the progress.
 
Thank you, starting to look at the station marks I made and seeing where the cockpit and the hatches will go. I shrink and crop the pictures down before posting so they don't take much in the way of bandwidth. The two steps forward one step back way of learning is tough. Today wasn't a "fun" day so to speak other than peeling it free of the stations, that part was pretty cool. I know I'll be able to use filler with the black hull to hide mistakes but it would be nice to get it right the first time for a bit.
 
It's not the scraping or the sanding that bother me. It was being unable to cut an even edge because I left the epoxy too long and planed the sheer strip to a 45 made for a frustrating day yesterday. I grabbed a picture to show what I mean. I suppose all it will mean is extra time filling in and careful application of more black epoxy when I join the two halves. I was planning on a silver/reflective accent stripe at the seam anyway but my wife disagrees. Well coffee break is over, time to get back to sanding.
 

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Using some sticky back sandpaper on a board or piece of stiff pink foam wil make a 'plane'-type tool for smoothing edges with glass and epoxy.
https://www.leevalley.com/en-ca/sho...ng/sheets-and-rolls/20179-psa-sandpaper-rolls

I'm also fond of my rasp(s) for that type of job, thogh I notice they have gotten extrmely expensive since I bought my last one.
https://www.leevalley.com/en-ca/shop/tools/hand-tools/files-and-rasps/rasps/20133-hand-cut-rasps

You are probably looking ahead to the very sharp 'turn' to the deck behind the cockpit on the Frej (and other similar Thomasson designs).
I'm assuming that was the reason for the bevel on the edge of the hull sheer strip?
It might be useful to put a 'doubler' strip a.k.a. sheer clamp along that hull edge, for at least part of the way at the cockpit and stern. You can do that easily now and get the lower edge of that strip rounded over (or bevelled) to 'blend in' with the hull inside before glassing. I thought of doing that on a couple of Thomasson builds but since the boats were going to be painted I realized that I could hide mistakes and reinforce thin areas easily with 'the miracle of epoxy'. :)
 
Yes, it was to help with the tight curve and it's also how Nick explains it in his book. Most people never post pics of the "first strip" and I wondered how to get started for a long time. Eventually I just decided to go with Nick's way to get started and see how it worked out.

I spent some time sanding this morning and thinking about CPS saying that it's starting to look like a boat. So I dug out the 3rd blueprint that shows where to locate everything and then had to get the pencil grinder out again. I needed to clearance more to move the skeg box further back. After some careful grinding I put a rounded head on my scraper and shaved out a bunch more. I now have walnut showing all the way back to where the skeg box will be located. After looking over the print and seeing what would be visible also got me upping my level of sanding in the cockpit and the hatch bottoms. Had to do some hand sanding in the ends where my ROS doesn't fit. Dusty work and that will have to continue when I next get some spare time.

I also started thinking about bulkheads and foot braces. I was going to put Sea-lect adjustables in but might look into a foamed out bulkhead instead. Not many people will fit the displacement of this boat so fitting multiple paddlers isn't a concern.
 

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Thanks CPS, everything went OK.

No one really shows how they do the ends of their kayaks (in detail) in their videos or in the 3 build guides I have. At least none that I could find this morning anyway. Rod had a good video showing him do a canoe so I followed that one. He lays the glass into the bottom then splits it up the middle with a razor knife. He pulls half the glass out of the way, re-lays one side and trims it again. He then swaps them out and trims the other. I trimmed it so that I had about 3/8" between the two expecting them to grow and touch when wet out.


Just before the 1st fill coat I trimmed the excess glass while the epoxy was green. I started the fill coat by first laying a strip of bias cut cloth about 3" wide and about 2-3" longer than the slit in each end. It was difficult to get those pieces to get to lay perfectly flat and eventually I decided to stop mucking with them. There were just a few air bubbles I wasn't happy with. I was working by myself today and was a little slow with the epoxy. I ended up with a few sags/runs so I'm going to do a second fill coat tonight so I can touch up with a sander later and stay out of the cloth. I'll do some dams and fill the ends up with LDFC and epoxy at the same time. I want the strength there for dragging and lifting.
 

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