In this episode Nick and Bill continue work on building the Petrel Play SG stitch-and-glue sea kayak from a kit by Chesapeake Light Craft. We've got a lot of little fiddly assembly steps to tackle, like gluing things up and waiting for epoxy to cure. These are perfect for chipping away at over evenings when we don't have huge chunks of time. We'll work on the coaming, cut out the fiberglassed bulkhead and skeg box parts, assemble the skeg box, and see how much we can get done.
First up, we removed the dams we had installed in the end pours on the hull and drilled holes through the end pours for carrying toggles and deck lines. Then we peeled off the peel ply cloth from the fiberglassed parts, which gives a nice smooth finish ready for varnishing. I took a little detour to explain where I get these nifty Swedish paint scrapers from Silent Paint Remover. We carefully trimmed and cut out all the fiberglassed bulkhead pieces and the skeg control components.
For the skeg control knob, I marked out and drilled oversized holes to be filled with epoxy before re-drilling to final size. This seals up the end grain so the set screws will thread into plastic epoxy instead of wood. We drilled holes in the skeg box spacers too and filled them with neat epoxy. Then we thickened up a batch of epoxy to glue together the skeg box spacers into the box assembly.
Next we prepped the coaming riser section that will sit on the deck. I decided to remove the coaming lip piece for now, even though I had started gluing it on, because the order of operations is critical. Putting the lip on after glassing the deck will allow easier glassing underneath the lip andcoaming riser area which is a high-stress section. Sometimes you need to re-evaluate and change the plan as you go.
We discussed the importance of thinking through the order of operations and how doing steps out of order can make things much trickier down the line. While my original plan saved time now, it would have complicated things later. So we'll glass the deck first before addressing the final installation and glassing of the coaming components. Flexibility and adaptability are key when you're building a complicated project like this kayak.
Hey, welcome back to The Guillemot Kayaks Workshop. I'm Nick Schade and this is Bill, and we are continuing to work on the Petrel Play SG, a stitch and glue Sea Kayak. We've got the kit from Chesapeake Light Craft. It's my design, but Chesapeake Light Craft makes the kit.
So we are in the process of sort of taking care of bits and pieces now. There's a lot of little things where you got to glue something up and then let glue dry, and so the order of operations becomes a little bit critical now because once you get glue on something, you can't really do anything with that until the glue dries. So we're just going to sort of peck away at those bits and pieces, and these are processes and steps that you know, you can sort of do a little bit in an evening, can be dealt with quickly. And if you don't have the order of operations perfect, well, you just do some more the next evening.
So what we will work on today is we have the coaming that we started work on. We'll do some more work on that. We have the fiberglassing that we did, the bulkheads, the coaming, the skeg Box, etc. We have gone through the process of fiberglassing both sides of those. Now we will cut those out of the fiberglass and trim them up and get them ready to use. And then we'll assemble the skeg box, and like I said, we'll assemble the coaming, and we'll see how far we get and how long it takes.
First thing I want to do is, we have the end pours on the hull. Sometime in one of the previous episodes, I can't keep track of when it was, but we have these little dams. We put those in, and we used a bit of old squeegee to make a little Dam and taped it in there. So Bill, you can just try to break that out, see what it takes. Not too much. Yeah, basically there's nothing to it. So that we now have a nice solid chunk up here, and we could end up drilling a hole through that even right now. This is where we will have carrying toggles or deck lines and just things to carry the boat, tie the boat down to the roof of the car, etc.
So I want to drill a hole through this again for where a carrying toggle goes, and so I've got my drill here, and I'm going to start with a smaller hole. And you could just take and, you know, line this drill up here and have at it. I find it a little helpful to make sure I'm going through Straight and level, etc., to have this little jig thing. It doesn't do too much, but it gives me something to align the drill with so I can just set it up like that and then drill straight through. And I, you know, I can see that I'm not canting the drill one way or the other up or down. So and, you know, I see I'm going through the meat of that endpour there.
Alright, nice. That hole's got a harsh Square Edge on it, so this is just a little counter sink, fairly big holes. So just to clean up that edge a little bit, make it like a half, in yeah, something like that. You, that cleans it up nice. Yeah, it does. And so the Rope coming through there will be less likely to chafe, right? And we can do, go do that at the other end too.
So you may remember last time we ended up using some peel ply. So these are the various bits and pieces, and we still have the peel ply on here. That's this piece of cloth right there. That peel ply can now be peeled off. And if you look at this piece, the surface of this is very smooth. This's a little bit of texture where it didn't completely wet out the peel ply, but compared to this side, you have a lot more texture on this side. You know, nothing wrong with this, this is just a little bit smoother, and some of the excess resin has been pulled out of this. That's what the peel ply does. And we've we've got bunch of parts with the peel ply on it. This is very smooth, basically a little bit of sanding, you know, it doesn't really need any more fill coat. You could sand that smooth and fiberglass it, where this, if you wanted a nice finish on this, you'd need to give this a light sanding, put a fill coat on it, sand that, and then go to Varnish.
So it's an extra step, and technically it's a little bit heavier. Basically the same epoxy we had on this side was on this side, then we put the peel ply down and peeled off some of that resin. So there's some resin in this peel ply, and so there's less resin on here than there is on here, and it's ready for finish, where this is not.
So we can just go ahead and peel these, the rest of these off. Alright, yeah, make sure you're peeling the the, yeah I screwed that up, yeah. Alright, okay, so now we have these pieces that we can just cut out of the glass Loosely, and then we can go ahead and try to trim these tight to the wood. So be careful with the utility knife. So it's not critical that you get this like 100% off, no, right? We're we're going to sand it a little bit, but but the more you do with the utility knife, the less you got to do with sandpaper.
Where it's peeled up there, we can just trim that flush. So the downside of the peel ply is it adds a little bit of extra things to watch out for. So you know, we had a little lifting off here, and we didn't realize it because the peel ply made it hard to see. Just cut away that excess, yeah, just trim that flush, yeah. So right, hold it flat to the surface and trim it down flush. You, it's good.
Those are handy little tools. Where do you get those? So I use these scrapers a lot in this, H strip built method, but these come from a company that sells a infrared paint stripper tool, Silent Paint Remover I think the company's called. They're paint scrapers made in Sweden by Anza. I haven't found any other source in the United States for these other than that Silent Paint Remover.
We had a little bit of excess epoxy here that glued the piece down to the paper, so I'm just scraping that paper off there. Though it does a pretty good job of cleaning that up. Alright, so here's the pieces that we've glassed, all those bits and pieces. We also have the skeg itself, which we put two layers of fiberglass in both sides and then added these spacein there. So we want to trim the glass off of that as well. Watch your hands there. You know, the number of scars I have on this hand, which is my holding hand from, you know, holding on to something and then ending up down range of the, the sharp thing. That's right.
This is a little skeg control box which we glassed the inside, so just trimming the glass off of there. He has two layers of glass on that, yeah, it's a little tougher. Yeah, it's a lot tougher. We want it tougher because it's going to be just sort of hanging down. If we need to sand that stuff away, we can do it that way as well. We get, yeah, it's close enough, yeah. So we have some skeg pieces here that I want to concern ourselves with. This is the skeg itself. We've now glassed it on both sides. This is going to end up being the control knob.
So in the instructions here, there's a drawing for the control knob, and this is the material for that. We are going to have the control cable running through this perpendicular to the knob, and then a set screw going down to clamp that cable there. So we want to Mark the holes for that. So looking at the grain of this, we'd like the grain to be going across the top of the knob. Then I want to drill a hole somewhere in here and and then somewhere in here going this way. So there's going to be a hole across this and a hole down, and we're going to fill those with epoxy also. And then redrill so it does, to seal the grain up, yeah, seal the grain up, make it so that set screw is not threaded into wood, it's threaded into plastic with the epoxy.
The drawing here says there's a 3/16 hole through here and the radius to this bottom Edge is 7/16. So this, that means the center of this hole is at 7/16. So if I set my calipers here to 7/16, and then I'll just go across here. So I've got a line there. And then I want the center, which this whole thing, all the way across here. So the width of this block here is 1 and 2 in. So this is a little bit less than 1 and 1/2 in. So we want to find the center of that, which is 3/4 of an inch. And so I'm just going to go straight across there. And so the intersection of those two, right there, we want a hole.
We also want a hole from the top down at that 3/4. So right here. And then this piece is currently about 3/4. So we want 3/8 to find the center of that. And so that Center Point is right there. We want to end up with a 3/16 hole there. We want to drill that oversize, then fill it with epoxy, and then drill the 3, yeah, okay. So you leave a little right, layer of plastic, yeah.
So so let's make this like a 1/6 bigger in radius. So right now the hole is a 3/16 diameter, so we will make it a 5/16 diameter hole here. So this, this one is 5/16. And we'll just make the other one the same size because we'll have that bit in there. So two holes, one going across this way and one going down this way.
Likewise on this, we're going to have a cable coming down here. So here's what it looks in carbon fiber. There's a hole through here and the set screw going in this way, and the cable going down this way. And I have the cable go beyond where the set screw hit, so there's a little extra there. And I like to have a hole where the set screw hits so that Cable's going to get mangled a little bit, and that's room for the cable to be mangled in.
I'd say we'll we'll go for a quarter inch hole here, quarter inch in this way, quarter inch going down this way, and we'll fill that all with epoxy here. Let's drill a quarter inch across here, and we will tape this off and fill both sides with epoxy. So this whole thing, big solid chunk of epoxy in there for the Pivot Point.
The other skeg part we have is this is the skeg box. We just need to glue this stack together. This piece here is going to get cut off when it's installed in the boat. This just makes sure that it's the right width down here when we install it in the boat. So we need to clean this up so it fits tight together. There's a little bit of squeeze out glue here. We also want to clean up the inside surfaces of this a bit just to make it smooth because we're not going to have access to that. Just use sandpaper on that, just use sandpaper on that, yeah.
You technically could probably use a file or a rasp here, clean it up that way. Sandpaper works. We've got the squeeze out glue here, just some drips of glue here. Again, just get that level down flat. One thing about the peel ply is it makes a surface is ready for more gluing. It's already roughed up because we've peeled the epoxy off of there and left the fabric texture on here. So when we go to glue this to here, wherever we have peel ply, we don't need to sand that more. Where if on the other side we have no peel ply, that will need to be roughed up to make a good glue surface. And we want to level these pieces out, make sure These are nice and flat so they fit down nicely against here.
Here we had the place where the fiberglass peeled up, so I'm going to make sure that's on the outside. And then this whole thing is going to get glass wrapped around this Edge, and so we'll cover over that. Get that cleaned up, get holes drilled in this. We will also end up installing this on the coaming. This is the coaming lip. So I think we will move over to the drill press for now.
Alright, so we have a 5/16 drill chucked in here, so we're going to first go across, then we're going to go down. So it went all the way through down here, so this comes out the bottom side, so it ends up intersecting that hole there and coming out that way. When we go to drill the next hole that will be tapped for the set screw, we can run the tap past this hole.
The skeg here, I'm going to drill a hole down this way and then a perpendicular hole this way, and a third hole straight across, all of them in order to get that first hole started. I want to clean up some of this rough fiberglass there, just to have a good place for that drill to go. And then I want to place the piece so the drill is going to go vertically, following this back edge here. So I'm just going to clean up that edge so we can see that a little bit better. I'm going to clamp it in here and then set it up so it's parallel to the drill like that, and I'll lower this down a little bit more. And I want to get right down in the middle of that middle ply of plywood.
I'm going to drill down most of the way here, on another hole straight across. And I'm about a half inch from this top Edge. Finally, I'm going to drill through here so I get the intersection of those two holes. So vertical hole down here, perpendicular one going across cross to hit that first one, and then the third hole going 90° to all of them. And this whole thing will, tape these up and fill it with epoxy.
The last hole we have here is where the pivot hole is going to go. We've already filled the skeg with epoxy. We'd like to fill these two spacers with epoxy. I'm just going to flatten that surface out, and I stick with a quarter inch hole, just right through the middle of that. All of these holes we can take a counter sink and just clean up the edges on.
Okay, so some previous episode we glued up the stack of spacers to make the coaming Riser here. We put some packing tape down on the surface of the boat here, so presumably this won't stick. So we can now take the clamp s off, all cured now, and let's see if it comes off. Alright, yeah. Well, I just want to Mark the top because this might have, you, this has a little bit of curvature. We don't want to try and put it down like this because it won't fit tightly. We will probably figure that out easily enough when we try to do it, but I'm just going to put a T on the top here. Now we can pull off all this tape.
So this will eventually just get glued straight back down, but we want to have the lip on top. And the whole reason for doing this in a multi-step process is so we can clean up the surfaces on this once we have the lip on here. That surface in here is going to be hard to reach, right? We can get sort of do a cursory job on this surface here, and then when we glue this together, we are going to eventually smooth this all to nice continuous surface here. The inner diameter here, it's not as key that we get everything cleaned up just yet because we'll have another go at it later on. But we want to get that outside cleaned up.
So I have a sander over here, and we will take and just run this against that to clean up that surface. Definitely calls for some breathing protection. Again we, we're just going to try and get this surface cleaned up. We don't need to get rid of all the epoxy. We just want a nice smooth surface.
There, keep it flat there, yeah. We don't want to Bevel it, are we trying to get this all without RG, a? Yeah, we'd like to have it smooth all the way top to bottom. That's good, yeah.
So this looks good. We, you know, we don't need to get rid of every little scrap of epoxy showing there. We just want to make this smooth. Again, this is going to be under the coaming, and we will spread some more epoxy on that just to seal up that ingrain. But you know, something like that looks good. The and we can quickly just do the inner diameter here just to naked, so it doesn't hurt our hands.
The last thing we want want to do is just make sure the top surface here is all smooth, there's no goobers sticking up. So that's all cleaned up now, it's ready to go back on the boat. This coaming lip's going to go on top of it.
So I'm just going to do a quick clean up of it as well, while we're at it. Alright, so I'm just going to do a quick clean up of some of these pieces. The last bit for this skeg box spacers is just cleaning up this inside surface. Again, I'm going to use the rasp. We've got the rounded side and the flat side on the finer grit here, and just going to go ahead and get that nice and smooth. And if we need to use some sandpaper in there we can, as well. But just and then before I finish with the sander, I'm just going to clean up the skeg here a little bit.
So on this skeg here, I just rounded the Leading Edge a little bit and tapered down the trailing Edge a little bit, just we, we done some shaping before we glassed it, but just to get that shaping back and just cleaned up everything else. So next thing to do will be fill these holes here, and you can knock this little lump down too, okay?
Alright, all right. So we have a couple things we're going to get to with maybe one batch of epoxy, we'll see how it works out. We're going to glue together the skeg box here, so I just want to dry fit it, make sure it goes together tightly, nothing in the way. We want to get these edges all lined up as best we can, okay? It looks like that will go together fine.
These pieces, We're Gonna Fill everything with epoxy, so I want to, when you're saying filling with epoxy, not to fill it material, just it will be somewhat thick in epoxy, but not not with the filp material. And just taping over those holes, so I'm going to fill one hole. Actually I'll do it this way, pour down from there.
All right, so this will pour down there, fill it all the way up to the top. With these, we'll tape over one, one side. We don't want this to the epoxy to drip out. Try and get it in there and got to cap that end, and then cap the other side of this. So we'll fill these three holes that will get glued together.
And then we're going to dry fit the coaming lip here, just to make sure it goes down nicely. So this piece, we want to Center on the, the existing hole in the deck, get it even all the way around. Theoretically it's the exact same size as this hole, but somehow it always seems to not feel like it's the exact same size. Then this piece will go down on top, and again, this hole should match up with everything else. And we want to just, as a drive fit that, make sure we've got a handle and how that goes together.
With this, I would like to just scuff up the edges here where the glue is going to be. Eventually the skeg itself is going to sit in here and ride in here, and it needs to make, we need to be sure there's no snags or anything for this to rotate like this. We'll worry about that later. Likewise here, just make sure everything's smooth. We had the peel ply on this, all right?
So we'll mix up some epoxy to deal with these things and going on from there. So I've mixed up a small batch of epoxy here, and I haven't thickened this one at all. For these, I want it to be able to flow pretty well into all the little nooks and crannies, so it's just straight epoxy. And I'm going to pour it, make double check that this glue, glue as well, or the tape as well, burnish down. And then I'm just going to pour it directly down the hole there, and it will, the some bubbles will rise to the surface, and it'll soak into the end grain a little bit. So that level we see there will probably go down a little bit.
Again, I want to get it down through the hole on this, fill that other side, and then fill up onto this side. This one is a tricky one, this got, it's got to reach a lot of, go down all sorts of different directions. Just going to pour it slowly, give it a chance to run down into the hole that runs this way.
I'm just going to put something under it to hold it level. And as this sucks down in, you can top off the epoxy a little bit. So I want to make sure that the inner surface of these spacers is well sealed with epoxy. So I'm just going to take some of that epoxy I've got mixed up here and brush it onto that surface. We're not going to have access to this once it's installed in the boat. I just want to make sure no end grain is left showing there, let that soak in. You get that side? Yeah, right.
So Bill pointed out, I didn't get this straight long side down here. That's actually going to get cut off, so that's not part of the finished boat. So I'm not that worried about it. So I didn't bother wasting epoxy on that.
Alright, so now I'm going to thicken up some epoxy and use that to glue together the other parts. I'm going to keep this unthickened epoxy and just feed these various places if they start to need it. So I've mixed up some epoxy here, and this is unthickened at this point for gluing these pieces together. Remember I would like to thicken it up, and that's what this, U copil is for. So I'm just going to add enough of this to make sort of a mayonnaise or salad dressing consistency, something that doesn't just flow Away From The Joint you're trying to glue. So it, it still has some ability to flow around, but it, you know, it stays in place a little bit.
Alright, so we can then take and put some all the way around the perimeter of here. We're putting a nice pile there so when we go to glue these together, we get some squeeze out on that. So me, go ahead and keep on working on that, just see if these have drained away a little. So is the idea to have a little squeeze out on these? Yeah, yeah, we want a little squeeze out, yeah. And and if you're looking for a place to hold it when you go to do the other side, where you're holding it's now is good. You don't actually need to put glue where your hand is. So both sides looking good.
Alright, so we'll make a sandwich with that being the peanut butter in, in the middle there. Let, see we had the one with the funky outside, yeah? I think the scratch up one, yeah. So this is one side, this is the other, yeah. So this one goes on top of there, and then we want to clamp that all together, make sure you know, get, put a couple clamps on it, make sure everything's lined up well. And then add some more clamps, and there's no such thing as too many clamps in the situation like this, l, no such thing as too many, okay?
The last thing I will do is I'm going to have it curing in this orientation as opposed to this orientation, so any drips of squeeze out that happen along here don't end up migrating into the volume itself where we, we want the skeg to eventually go. So we're just going to put it here, and we'll actually put it off to the side someplace where we're not going to knock it over. That's the, drill.
So the long Edge to the top, the ragged Edge to the bottom, and just set that aside to let it cure. So while we have that glue mixed up here, we will butter this up just the same way we did that skeg box. So a nice bead on top of here.
We can either add a bead on top of the deck here or we can do the other side of the com lip or CL Riser. We have this section here where there's no guidance for where to put glue, so it's probably easier to do it on the Riser itself. So can have it, that we could also apply it on here, but I think again, it's easier to just do it on the Riser, yeah, flip it over for now, get one side, make sure everything's covered. We're going to get some squeeze out, so we're not at all worried about the, right now, correct? Once this all clamped together, we will do the, the hidden Edge, yeah.
This is, wants to be waterproof seal when we're done, flip it over, stick it down and place here as best we can, get it centered, lined up, can and then, all right? So now we, sper the hole, both Sid, back now where I'm, so right here, put on, so close cled. So try not, you know we, it's going to get some on the deck, oh yeah? No, I, I just remembered I should have done this after after glassing the deck, what's that? Putting this lip on here, oh really? Because then we're doing it down on the glass, yeah.
I was just trying to save time. Um, you know, let's go ahead and take it off, it, get edited out, yeah. It might get edited out, but all right. I, I'm, we're going to pull the coaming off here because it's a lot easier to do this after glassing the deck then the, the glass is under this and we don't worry about getting stuff epoxy on the deck so much. Again, I was just trying to get as much done in order of, order of operations matters here.
What are you, take that off with this denatured alcohol? Yeah, oh are you taking everything off? Yeah, because I wanted the glass down under here, yeah. You can see where that would be much easier to, yeah.
Alright, order of operations matters, what you know? I, I didn't explain it too much, but right now, you know, we were trying to put the coaming on, and as I was buttering up the underside of the coaming, I was looking at this and saying, that's getting all over the unglinga hang over here, and it'll be fine from the order of operation standpoint, getting, putting the coaming on later has some advantages.
You know, there's some order of operations where there's some benefit to having the coaming on earlier because we're not going to Glass this, or at least my plan is not to Glass this until it's on the hall, okay? So we're going to run that glass from the deck about an inch or two down onto the hall, and will take care of the outside seam, right? But we are going to end up having to put this on when the deck is already installed, right?
I want to then clean up this surface here and round over to the underside of the deck, which will be a matter of using a Ras to get under there. If I, oh yeah, you know, if I put it on now, I could have used power tools and a router to round that over, okay?
And I also want to Glass the coaming lip from the top down the riser to the underside of the deck. That would be easier if I did it the way we're doing it right now, yeah. I decided that overall easiest way, the easiest way, is to take this off now, glass the deck as planned. I could, you know, we could go ahead and get the deck ready for glass right now, glass it, put the coaming on, do all that rounding over and glassing of the coaming, and then install the deck on the hall, right? And then as a separate operation, glass the outside, do the, so none of these are wrong, they're all good answers, right?
To a certain extent, it just depends on what you see as your schedule and how things work out for your schedule. I, and you know, I, I was kind of looking at my schedule, you know, bringing Bill on here. Um, you know, Bill's got to drive 40 minutes to get here or whatever it is. Um, and you know, so it's an imposition on him to come here. And then this is a fairly short day because once this is all, these things are glued up, we kind of have to quit for the day, uhh. So I'm, sending Bill back before lunch, and you know, so I, there's a lot of things that we're trying to deal with in the timing, yep.
And we could have just gone ahead with what we had happening here, yep, and it would have been fine, just more difficult in one step, yeah. Would have been more difficult, and it would have been a tricky step getting the glass under here. We really want good glass all the way to the coaming and preferably under the coaming. When you go to pick up the boat, you're picking it up from right here, right, right, right. So the glass is, this glass is taking a lot of load, yeah, be very structural, yeah. It's, it's, it's an integral part of the strength of the boat. You know, you sit on the coaming, you sit back here, you know, Ro, goes down, yeah, there's a lot of stress in this area. So getting this good is important, and the other hardships that we are putting off aren't as hard as this one is, right?
So it's balancing that, and plus it gives me something to talk about right now in the video and something for everybody watching this video to think about, you know, how does what I do right now affect future planning, your future processes? Um, and you know, it's a thing. So you know, I, I just decided this is a worthwhile thing to go ahead, take it off you. Now know a little bit about how to clean it up, the denatured alcohol. Um, you know, this will have a code of epoxy here, we're going to want to give this a light sanding before, yeah, because there there's a little bit of epoxy there interfering with the perfect glue joint. But that's all fine. I think that will be the end of it for this video. It was, you know, hopefully this will edit down to a fairly short video.
We'll see. So you know, the drill, this is YouTube, notifications, subscriptions, like, share, patreon, all that good stuff. So so until the next time, thanks for watching, and happy paddling.
