Completing the Petrel Play SG: Final Outfitting Steps - E31

Hey, welcome back to the Guillemot Kayaks Workshop. I'm Nick Schade, and we are working on the Petrel Play SG kit from Chesapeake Light Craft. Chesapeake Light Craft made the kit, and it's my design. We're building from this CLC kit. In the last episode, I installed the bulkheads and installed the hatch rings here. So now all we have left to do is sort of outfitting the boat, which is deck lines, putting in the skeg, the backrest, the foot pegs, etc.

With the hatches, now these rings are in place, so these hatches go on there, and that's the watertight hatch. I started this before I turned on the camera. From the skeg box back here up to the skeg control, there is a tubing through which a cable will run. That tubing hooks up to the skeg box back here via the barb fitting we put on earlier, and so that barb fitting slides into the end of the tube here, and friction keeps it on. We do have some hose clamps in the kit, and we'll hose clamp that down to be belt and suspenders to make sure that it doesn't come off.

So, I've already slid that onto the skeg box here. The hose clamp is on there now. I'm looking to run this through the hall we made in the bulkhead, and that's going to have this gland fitting on in that hole, and that's going to make that hole watertight. We could just use caulk around that hole, make a smaller hole that's just big enough for this tubing, caulk around that. This hopefully is a little bit more secure, a little bit drier, and then it'll come up to the stainless-steel tubing at the skeg control here.

At this point, I'm just working on fitting this. I've got the hole through here, and there's a little bit of gunk around there from the fillet I put in mounting the bulkheads. So, I'm just going to try and clean some of that gunk off. That gland nut's a little bit tricky to get in there. If you space it off, it might be a little bit easier, space it farther from the side of the boat. Right now, I've got the little gasket that goes in the gland nut off.

There’s the gland nut right there, and now I will snake the tube through there, and this goes it will connect to that piece of tubing right there. So, we want to have an overlap about an inch or so here with a tube fairly tight through there. We don't want any kinks in it, something like that. This little gasket goes down into the gland nut, and that's what seals that gland nut up. Then, this nut tightens it down, and we'll connect it to there, put on the other hose clamp, and then this slides onto that tubing.

We'd like it about an inch, but right now I've got 3/4. These can go on a little easier if you lubricate them. There we go, but generally, it can slide on, and then we'll get that hose clamp bring it up here, so it clamps it there. That’s the tube going all the way back to the skeg. Now I'm going to install the seat. The kit comes with this seat here. It comes with a little bit of shock cord, some webbing, a few screws, and some little electrical tie loops.

I'm going to end up using some different screws than they have here. A few episodes back, I drilled some holes in behind the coaming here. I'm going to run bolts through there instead of these screws. But we will start by taking this webbing, and you've got four loops on the back of the backrest. We'll run through here through here.

Now you see we've got a little shock cord going through the top loops and then back through the bottom loops. I'm going to tie a knot with these two pieces. I'm going to tie what's called a water knot. So, if you take your standard just overhand knot like that and now I'm going to run this cord back through that following the original cord. So, I'm going to do everything the original cord did just do it backwards. You see we still have that same overhand knot. Now I'm going to pull that tight.

This is a very good knot for tying shock cord to itself. This won't come undone. Shock cord has an amazing way of coming undone. Now we have the shock cord mounted on here, and now I'm going to attach it to the back here. Again, I've got these two holes back here. I'm going to end up putting a couple 10-24 bolts right through there. I will use the finish washes they provide in the kit.

These will go down through there and I'm going to have the nut on the inside, so there's nothing sticking up to catch on your hands. We'll drill a hole right through there. This is about a 3/16 hole.

That’s there now. On the inside we will put this little loop is going to go around one of these sticky Aude bits here, like that. We will put a washer and a nut on that. I'm going to just get the other little loop here again onto the sticky Audy bits here, so now that threads up onto that screw and the other end this loop goes onto this screw, and we'll put a nut and washer on each of those.

Let’s get them started. That holds the backrest in place. Now we have these holes here, we have a little bit of webbing. We're going to take enough of this webbing to reach up to this hole, so that's about that much. We’ll melt that just to keep it from fraying, and we will do similar over on the other side, and always make these a little bit long if you're worried about it.

We’ll end up doubling this over, put a nut and finish washer in there, just to hold that end up. So, we want a hole through this. Going to just double it back on itself, so we got to nail here. I've got my torch now. I've got a hole through the webbing. Finish washer nut through the hole into here, and we will put a nut, washer, nut on the back of that, do the same thing on the other side.

Vice grips hold it securely. Just getting it a little bit red and just go right through the middle there. There’s a nice hole. That’s a secure way to make a hole through the webbing. Double it up there. That can take a lot of force. We’ll shove that through that side and now reach in here with a nut and washer.

You notice I had these holes filled. I drilled them oversize and then filled them with epoxy. That makes it so I can tighten down on the screw very tightly without crushing the wood. I'm using lock nuts on the Nylock, nylon lock nuts keep them from coming undone. All right, we can tighten the back band up, something like that. Just a little knot to help keep it secure there.

Next, we have the seat. This is a seat that comes with the kit. You laminate these two pieces together and glue them down into the bottom here and makes a very comfortable seat. I do have an upgrade that I make. This is the seat I make on my CNC machine, very contoured, and this would end up getting glued in the bottom in a similar fashion.

To assemble this, we want to use some contact cement or barge cement to glue together this lamination and then glue it to the bottom of the bat. First thing, I want to do is just get it sort of lined up and trace this shape on the underside here, and we're going to apply cement to that. This is barge cement. It is a contact cement something. If you have trouble finding this, I typically use contact cement that I get at the hardware store.

The critical thing you want is, I think it's Weldwood’s typically the brand you see at a regular hardware store. They have one that without fumes and one with fumes. You want the danger, danger warning, flammable, you know, all the special warnings here. You want all of those. That’s the good stuff. So, we're going to apply this to both surfaces that we want to glue. This comes with a brush in the can.

I'm just going to spread it all across this surface. Put this aside, spread the glue on here. All right, we are going to let this tack up a little bit. Basically, it should be roughly dry to the touch, and then we'll assemble those two laminations. When these two pieces are pretty much dry to the touch and I still have a couple shiny spots left, but we want them basically dry, and then we're going to take, line them up carefully. We've got one chance to get this lined up. The contact is pretty much instantaneous.

I'm just going to set it down in the front, work way around the edges. Give that a good compression, a little bit of this lining on that edge there, but okay. Now we have the assembled seat, and this is going to go right in here. We want it a couple inches in front of the backrest here.

The best way to do this is actually to paddle the boat a few times. Put the seat down, see where you're comfortable, see where the boat floats right for you, and you can move this backward, press a little bit farther back by loosening up the straps here, tightening up the water knot back here, and pull it in tighter to the back. I'm just going to live large and go ahead and put this down, so you can see how it's done. So, I’ve got it centered in the boat, and I've got my Sharpie again.

I’m going to make some marks around here. I'm not going to glue all the way around the perimeter. I'm just going to sort of glue the edges down. You can glue it all the way around, but I don't want water and grit and stuff trapped in there. This will let it flush out a little bit. It's not as secure as gluing it all the way down, but since I'm sort of again living large here, I'm going to do a little bit of a temporary glue down, but something along these lines is good.

Now I want to butter up this with the same barge cement, same process but just where we want the glue to be. To help me identify where I want the glue inside the kayak, I'm going to just take that wet glue, line it up here on my marks and stick it down briefly. Since the glue is wet, it won't actually stick, and I'll use that to apply a little bit more of the barge cement to the bottom of the boat.

I'm gluing this directly to the bottom of the boat. Then we will let that set up. So, that's about set up, so it's fairly dry on here, and it's fairly dry on there. Again, we want to get this lined up carefully, find our marks, and press it right in. There we go. So, by having that lamination, we actually end up with a nice contour to this seat. It's butt-shaped seat, and that should work great.

Now on to the foot pegs. A bunch of episodes, we pre-drilled some holes in the side of the boat here about an inch down from the shear line on which to mount these foot pegs. We measured that based on these actual pieces. We've got some screws here, quarter-inch screws, pan head screws, and we'll use those to mount them. They screw through the boat into the plastic. I'm going to start by finding the center of one of these spots here, drill right on through there.

Now to check our length here. I'm going to line this up just by putting a drill or something in there, then find the center of this. I have a Brad Point drill. We see where the center of this is. Now we'll drill through that mark there. These screws take a big bit to tighten them successfully. You want the end with the little tab here to be at the far end. That way this can't slide all the way off. To adjust these, you pull back on that lever, and you'll see there's a little bit of a rounded edge on the forward edge and then it’s square on the back edge.

That makes it lock in there securely. I'm going to reach down there, hook this screw into this hole here. Don't tighten it all the way. Take the next screw at this end, get it in there, line it up the hole there, tighten it up. Now you can tighten this one up. The tape in there is what I used when I filled these holes to just keep the epoxy from draining through. That tape can come off.

Can’t reach that last piece, so again I'm going to drill through from this side, one hole and mark it on here, drill the next hole, take the screws, put one in the far hole there. We'll get the foot peg on there. I’m going to hook it on there, make sure we get the right hole, just get it started on that, take the next throw through here. All right, foot pegs are mounted. You may have noticed I haven't varnished the bottom of the boat, so I'm going to have to take these right back out, but those are in there, that's how it's done.

Earlier, we drilled some holes here for deck lines. The kit comes with some shot cord and some webbing. I take webbing and make these pieces that create loops. One loop will go around the shock cord that goes up to our deck lines, and then I like to have a perimeter line, so the bottom half of that will go around here. The kit doesn't come with the perimeter line, but it comes with enough webbing to do this, and you can get your own perimeter line if you so choose.

I like a perimeter line. It's just a safety thing, should you come out of the boat, it's something to grab a hold of. So, I'm going to show you how I make these loops. I make a little jig. I've got a 4 in long mark here, and then I have three holes that are each an inch and 7/8 from each other, so I'm cutting a piece of webbing that's about 4 in long.

Start with a square end here, cut a bunch of 4 in long pieces, so we can have a whole bunch of those. Now I'm going to take, melt the ends of those, and then I'll set my jig down on top of there and once again with the nail. So, there I have my piece to make my loop. We’ll make a bunch of those.

A hot knife obviously makes this all go quicker, and if you want to be a little bit more sophisticated than the nail here, I have a piece of stainless steel tubing. This is the same tubing I use for the inside tube of the skeg control. We end up cutting off a little bit. I put a handle on it and made a little place for gunk to escape. Line up our jig here and there could probably be something with the soldering iron this quicker than this.

The other hole I have here is if I want to make a single-sided loop. These loops will get mounted with 10-32 screws, just like the backrest. I'm going to drill through all these holes all the way around with 3/16 drill and then mount those loops. The kit comes with some hardware here, a bunch of 10-32 screws, some finish washers, regular washers, and then Nylock nuts.

We’re going to take a bolt and a finish washer, we'll go through the middle, and fold either end in over the bolt and push that through. Then we will take a nut in a washer, put it on the inside, just get it started for now, tighten it up after we get the deck lines in.

Now I have the loops. I'm going to put some bungee across the deck lines. I like to have sort of a crisscross here and hold a lot of stuff. One end of this shock cord is taped. I'm just going to take that end and stick it through my little loop here.

Again, if you have these tightened down, you might not be able to get the loop through the C through. Actually, I think I will make the knot right here. I want a cord to come to about here, so I'm going to take a piece of tape, wrap it around the cord, pull it tight, wrap that tape tight around there, and then cut that. This piece will go here.

So, the easiest way to deal with the ends of this cord is again that water knot that I did before. I want a little bit of slack in this cord, so we have an overhand knot and then I follow that backwards through the knot, the same way the original knot was tied. So, I end up with another overhand knot and we'll pull that tight.

There we have front deck lines. I'm going to put a couple others here and I'll show you another way to deal with the end there. I like to have just a little bit of web shock cord on the front here, so I can put a spare paddle in. I'm going to run the cord through here, and we will cut this off a little bit long. Here I have some heat shrink tubing. Got an inch and a half or so. I'm going to slide that on there.

Now I have some hog rings. These are stainless steel pieces of wire bent in a C shape, and I can stick the hog ring on here, holding the two cords together, that tightened up a little bit. You can squeeze these with the regular pliers, but I have special hog ring pliers. I'm going to just squeeze that down tight, and we'll put another one on there just to be sure. Squeeze that down. Now we can cut off this excess cord.

So again, there's the hog rings on it. Take the heat shrink, put it over there. We'll get a little slack out of here, and we'll take a heat gun. That's a good clean connection there, and that's a good place to put spare paddles. Don't forget to put the heat shrink on before the hog rings.

I'm going to put perimeter lines around. We'll have it run through the toggle loop up here, back to where we got the deck lines, have a little cross here at the top. Just to that, a good place to hold, pick up the boat, and I'm going to have the deck lines end here at the cockpit. You can always grab a hold of the cockpit if you need to grab the boat, and here I'm going to tie a figure eight knot just as a stopper, pull that tight.

Through here again, just a little twist up here and then we'll come back here someplace. I'll just cut it a little bit long and run through these loops. Quickly frayed, so I'm going to take a piece of tape around here. You could melt that, but I'm going to be cutting it again, so just a quick little piece of tape around that and then cut it off, and that tape will hold it while I shove it through the loops.

Again, a figure eight knot down here, don't want that super tight but you want it tight enough that it doesn't flop around too much. Do the same thing at the other end. We will take my hot knife and just trim these ends off. Now I can tighten up these screws.

So, that's most of the deck lines. I've got the hatches all in, so I'm ready to install the skeg. What we have here, this is the control knob which is used to raise and lower the skeg that runs in this slot right here. That's the control slot. Then this control tube, the cable that comes back from the skeg fits inside this tube, and it needs to be clamped with this set screw.

This set screw, when threaded all the way in, will come down to this hole right here and clamp through a hole in this tube and grab a hold of the cable. This tube may not be strictly necessary, but it makes the cable run a little bit smoother, a little less likely to pop out of position.

We need to start with putting a little hole right into the very center of this tube. I'll do that over in the drill press. This tube here is about 9 and 1/4 inches long, so we will go to the end of that. If you still have it full length, you can cut it down to just over 9 inches long. We want half of that, so that’s 4 and 5/8. Just do a sanity check on that. Four and 5/8 sure looks good. I'm going to use a little center drill here to poke the hole into the tube.

Little hole in there. There’s likely to be a burr on this on the outside. It's easy enough to file off, but we need to get the burr out of the inside. I'm just going to take a little needle file and run it up in there, try and knock off that bur. When this was cut off, this end got a little bit smooshed in there, so I'm going to carefully open that up. Now that's clean, and what we want is for this cable to be able to be inserted into the end, goes in easy at this end.

You see it's binding up on the bur there. Somehow it feeds right past through there, comes out the other end. So, we've got the tapped hole here that's going to take a set screw. If you need to run the tap in there again to clean up the threads, do so. The cable goes in this hole right in here. There’s stuff in there. I'm just going to run the drill back through here to clean out that hole.

You can see it's down in there. We’d like to get that pushed past the little peak hole there, and now we’ll run the set screw down into that. This screw is pinching the cable there. Get that good and snug, so the cable can't come out. The threads here are into epoxy and some wood, so don't really crank down on it, but if the cable doesn't want to come out, that's a good sign. We want the tip of this set screw to go into that hole.

It goes in right now. The tip of this set screw is a little bit big, and so it will tend to crimp the tubing there and pinch the tubing, which will work, but if you ever have to service it, it'll make things more complicated. I want to take this little set screw and sharpen the end just slightly, a little bit more cone shaped. You see it's a cone already a little bit, but we're going to extend that back a little.

There, you see. Got a little bit more of a cone shape, so it'll fit in there. I’ll clamp on the cable instead of clamping on the tube. We’re looking down in the skeg slot here. Right up here is the axle or pivot point around which the skeg itself hooks. Then down there at the bottom, you can see the Barb fitting that comes in at the top of the skeg box where the cable will exit the skeg box and head up towards the control.

I’m going to try and fish the cable down into that hole. Make sure the end of the cable here is in nice shape, not twisted or mangled, because that needs to get through a couple places finally into the tube where the control knob is. I'm just going to fish this down there. It's not that hard to get it in there. We're going to run this in, and at some point, you'll feel it get to the tube by the control knob.

It looks like it got there, feels like it got in there. Let’s just take a look. Yep, so it's come out at the control slot. I'm going to take and hook this on right here. Let's give that a little bit of a filing to make it fit a little bit more smoothly. It’s settled in there. That’s all the way in. Now I'm going to pull the cable here.

That’s fully retracted. That’s fully deployed right about there. We want to start with it fully retracted. Here’s the cable. This way is back to the skeg, and here's the free end of the cable. There's another tube going out this way, so there's a piece of tube here and a piece of tube here. We want this to run into that far tube. Right now, we've got it fully retracted, so we've got the knob all the way forward. Fully deployed will be back there, so that's the throw of the whole skate.

I want to mark where I want to cut the cable off. It's right about there, so it ends up being a little bit inside the forward tube. I'm going to cut it off at that mark. Again, make sure that that's all twisted nicely together, that end there. This is a souvenir. So now this can go into that forward tube, but we're going to put the control knob tube in first. We'll take the set screw, thread it in here. We don't need those extra nuts anymore.

I'm going to thread this in till it just starts to poke through. There it is, I'll back it off so it's not poking through at all. I want to be able to get it onto this tube, and it'll end up like that. So, I'm going to now insert this tube into that forward tube and run it back.

Now I see the tube coming out. I'm going to put the cable inside that tube. Oops, first I'm going to get the knob, slide the knob on here, and now we’ll slide the cable inside of that. Now I'm going to run this tube back into the half tube. Might be a little bit stiff to get in there. Now it’s fed into the A tube and we can see the hole we drilled in here, right there. Going to try and line it up with where I think the set screw is and we'll slowly tighten the set screw. We want to feel that it's in the hole there.

Yeah, so it's in the hole. I'm not yet tightened up on the cable, so it's engaged in the hole but not tightened up on the cable. I've just slid the whole thing to the fully retracted and double check that it's in there. Yeah, so I'm feeling that it's in that hole, and now I'll cinch it down.

Now I should be able to fully deploy the skeg and fully retract it. It'll be a little stiff to begin with, as it breaks in, it'll loosen up. That's fully retracted and fully deployed, fully retracted. Just going to give another little twist to feel it, it's snug there, and that’s done. The skeg is now installed.

Alright, so that’s the skeg installed. In the normal course of operations, the boat would be ready to launch, but just to move the schedule along, I did not end up varnishing the final coat of varnish on the bottom yet, so I'm going to have to disconnect some things, quickly do that final coat, let it dry, and tomorrow I will be bringing it to the WoodenBoat Show.

With that, the kayak's complete. I will be working on creating a launch video and then doing a compilation of the whole build into one video. If you want to see those, please do all that great YouTube stuff: subscribe, turn on notifications, hit like, all that great stuff. If you watch this video to the end and thus watch the series all the way to the end, I really appreciate the support you've given me, and I hope you continue to do that in the future. Until the next episode, thanks for watching, and happy paddling.