Installing Hatches & Bulkheads - Petrel Play SG - E30

Nick begins by preparing the rear oval hatch ring, carefully fitting it into the deck opening. He uses a belt sander to adjust the ring's edges for a snug fit. Moving on to the bulkheads, Nick drills a hole in the rear bulkhead for the skeg control cable, using a gland nut to create a watertight seal. He then fits both the rear and front bulkheads, making small adjustments with sandpaper to ensure a proper fit.

To secure the bulkheads, Nick uses CA glue for temporary positioning, then applies a thickened epoxy mixture to create fillets along the seams. He carefully smooths the fillets with his finger, using denatured alcohol to prevent sticking. Nick pays special attention to hard-to-reach areas, using an exam mirror to check his work in tight spots.

For the hatch rings, Nick prepares a special adhesive called Gflex, which he modifies with additives to improve its properties. He adds mil fiber for strength, colloidal silica to thicken it, and graphite powder to match the black color of the hatch rings. Nick applies the adhesive using a pastry bag for precise distribution, then clamps the hatch rings in place.

Throughout the process, Nick offers various tips and tricks, such as using a wooden pusher tool to adjust the front bulkhead and adding tape handles to the hatches for easier manipulation. He also explains the reasoning behind his choices, like using flexible adhesive for the hatch rings to accommodate the different expansion rates of plastic and wood.

Chapters:

  • 0:00 - Introduction and project overview 
  • 0:52 - Preparing to install bulkheads and hatches 
  • 2:42 - Fitting the rear oval hatch ring 
  • 6:38 - Preparing the rear bulkhead 
  • 9:31 - Fitting the rear bulkhead 
  • 12:03 - Fitting the front bulkhead 
  • 16:55 - Installing bulkheads with epoxy fillets 
  • 22:22 - Gluing hatch rings with Gflex 
  • 30:37 - Conclusion and future steps

Hey, welcome back to The Guillemot Kayaks Workshop. I'm Nick Schade. We are working on the Petrel Play SG, a stitch and glue sea kayak kit from Chesapeake Light Craft. It's my design and Chesapeake Light Craft supplied the kit. Bill is not here right now. I'm kind of in the last minute push to get the boat done ready for the Wooden Boat Show which is coming up on this Friday. It is Tuesday. I want to get the boat all done by then, and just timing to get Bill in and so forth would make it hard to get the whole project done. So I'm just proceeding here using the moments I have between other things to try and get stuff done.

Last episode we finished up the varnishing. Actually, I've only done the finished varnish on the deck. I still have the hull to go, but we'll show that at some other point. What I want to do today is get the bulkheads installed and the hatch rings installed. Since I've done the deck varnish, I've left this area in here where the hatch ring will be glued down unvarnished. And with the varnishing all done, I don't need to worry about masking this off when I do the varnishing. So I will try to get that installed and we'll see how far we get.

I also want to get the deck lines in, and I may not do that today and it may be a separate episode. We'll see, depends on how smoothly things go. So for now, let's get right to it. We'll work on getting the hatch rings glued down and in place. And part of the reason I'm doing the hatch rings now and the bulkheads now is I'm hoping I can sort of have one epoxy cure cycle handle both objects, both tasks. So get the bulkheads put in, glued, get the hatch rings put in, glued, and then I'll have to wait a bit for that epoxy to cure. So by doing it kind of at the same time, I'm hoping I'll be able to basically save the 12 hours or so of cure times and combine them all in one. So we'll see how that works out.

So the rear oval hatch ring is going to go down in here and as you see, I don't have any varnish on this plot or there's some little bit of drips here and there and so I'm going to get rid of those drips, scrape them off. This hatch ring has a little lip down at the bottom here that sticks down and I want that to nestle inside this oval hole here. And right now, in order to get it set down in there, I kind of need to distort the ring slightly and I don't want to distort the ring. The seal of this hatch sort of depends on the ring and the hatch cover being the same shape. So I'm just going to take and sand away or file away at this edge just so this ring will fit down in there right.

So this seems to be binding up a little bit on either edge here. The diameter of this hole is a little bit under size right now. It's not much, but what I'm going to do is just sand off a little bit of this edge and that edge just to make it sit down in there a little bit easier. I'm going to mark front right here, just making a mark where those two stitch holes are just so I have a reference to get this back in the right place. Then I'm going to take it over here to my belt sander and just knock those corners off a little bit. Still behind right in here and right back there.

All right, that fits in well. So I just knocked a little bit off edges here, and that just gets it to fit snugly down in there. It won't fit, it won't affect how the hatch cover works. It'll be tight here but it'll all function just fine. So those hatches are ready. I'm going to just smooth up this edge a little bit. I do want to make sure I seal this end grain that I've exposed with the epoxy so it's not a place for the plywood to start sucking up moisture.

So here's the rear bulkhead. We glassed this a while ago. That will end up going right behind the cockpit in here someplace, but before I do that, we have a skeg here which you can just make out the skeg control slot here. Here's the tube for where the skeg control is going to be and that feeds the cable back through this polyethylene tubing to the skeg that's back here. In order to get the skeg through the bulkhead, we need to make a hole through here and you can either just make that hole sort of the size. I do that right in the corner right here so this the sheer corner. And you can either just drill a hole that's slightly larger than this tubing and then when it comes time to seal it, put some caulk around there to seal it up.

What I like to do is I get these gland nuts off of Amazon, and basically this is a little feed through that goes around the tubing like this and you tighten this down and it makes a sealed penetration there. And this gets threaded into a hole. So I want to make a hole for this. I again I get these off Amazon or you know, Master Car, various places have them. So I want a hole that this will fit through. I'll use a step drill to make that hole and it's going to be - and I'll just step it down a couple times so I've got to mark here like two steps after that mark, maybe three. And so that will be installed here and I also need to clean up these edges. They've got a little bit of epoxy and such.

So this bulkhead goes right behind the recess of the combing here and the widest point is up where the sheer line is. See if we can rotate that into place. Here, that's actually pretty good for the first try. It's right here, it's not quite square up so the distance - there's a stitch hole right here and a stitch hole right here. This stitch hole distance is closer than that stitch hole distance. So I'd like to - so it's sitting a little bit caned in there. So I'm just looking to see where it's binding up and I'll sand a little bit off of that. I'll put a little tab of tape just where I want to sand it so I can remember.

So little off those corners, a little bit off the top. There, I'm just going to use a little mallet just to knock at it to try and straighten it out a little bit. I want to scuff that area up. It's actually fitting pretty well. It usually takes a little bit longer. I'm going to scuff up the area where this meets the boat so I'm going to put a fillet in there and I want the epoxy to bond well. So I'm just going to make a quick set of marks here then scuff that up and we'll get a little wipe down with denatured alcohol just to clean it up.

So the front hatch is generally a little bit more difficult. It's harder to reach. You can get close through the front hatch. Couple things I do is I put a little handle on the hatch with some tape. This one's actually been on a while. I'll probably renew that and that lets me come down in here, grab that handle and then pull the bulkhead up towards where it needs to be. The other thing I have is just a chunk of 2x3, 2x4, whatever chunk of wood, a little T on the end and this just lets me reach down in there and push. So I can look down there, see where it's tight and make some adjustments.

So right now this is tight sort of in the chine corners. It's - would be amazing if after all this work the deck and hull and everything had exactly the shape that we intended at this bulkhead here. So you know, it's going to take a little bit of adjustment. Don't take off a lot at the time. It may look like you need a lot when you're looking in there, but just a small amount will start to move the bulkhead up into the end and tighten everything up again. I'll put some tabs of tape on where I want the adjustments to happen.

I'm using the square end of my T-pusher here to help square that up. So this fit is actually pretty good. Put a light behind it. See there's some gaps all the way around but that'll do just fine. We're going to put a fillet in it. The fillet will fill up that gap. So again, we want to mark the edge here, this get an idea where this is here and we'll knock it out. That came out that dust. Clean it with denatured alcohol. Jam it back in place here.

And we'll mount the back bulkhead back in place. Slide it in there. Once again we've got some gaps around here, but the fillet will fill those up. Now we're going to take and just put some spot welds of CA glue here, here, just a couple places where they touch just so the bulkhead doesn't pop free when we're working on it.

So here I have a standard fill mix. I'm going to inject that along that seam. Need this batch a little thick. Not that I want it that way, just came out that way. And add it to both sides. I'm distributing all the fillet material quickly because it's warm in the shop and that bag of filling mix will kick off pretty quickly if I leave it alone. Just removing those pieces of tape so I don't get the tape in there. I will just fillet this side of the front bulkhead because I'm not small enough to reach both sides.

Instead of - have to do this top edge by feel. Got a little exam mirror here to see what's going on up at that top edge. All right, I've got the mix distributed all the way along that seam. Now we will smooth it out. Putting a little denatured alcohol on my finger, just running it through that fillet. I want to push it in a little bit, get it to squeeze through to the far side. All right, it looks like we've got the mix everywhere we need it. Now I'm just going to neaten that up a little bit.

All right, now we'll smooth the back bulkhead. And I'll reach inside here, smooth that out as well. You want to clean out that hole, make sure the gland nut will fit in there. The pressure from the back side push some of this out. We'll just smooth that back down again and we'll just use a rag to clean up some of the mess. Looks pretty decent. It's not too bad.

All right, so with those in place I can now turn my attention to gluing the hatch rings in. So we're going to glue the hatch rings down here and the - I'm going to use G/flex, which is a flexible adhesive. One property of G/flex is it doesn't thicken up as much as some other things and tends to drain out for a while. So it's to protect the inside and keep control over the drips. I'm just going to put some masking tape around the perimeter here. All right, that will keep it from dripping down too much. Do the same on the front hatch.

So first I'm going to paint some of the regular low viscosity unthickened epoxy just to help seal up that edge grain like I talked about earlier. So just put a little bit of that around the perimeter, front and back. All right, while that soaks in I'm going to prep the rings a little bit. The bottom surface of this is where we're going to glue. I'm just going to take and scratch that up a bit. Clean that off with denatured alcohol.

So I'm gluing the hatch rings down with G/flex here. This is an epoxy that's designed to be flexible. So for this purpose with the hatches, I'm mating two dissimilar materials together, the plastic and the wood, and that tends to - they'll have different expansion rates and so forth. So having a little bit of flex in there is good. CLC, I believe, sells this. It's a one-to-one mix. Right now I've got just a little bit left in this bottle. I've got another bottle so I'm just going to take and empty out all of this in here.

So this is fairly high viscosity stuff. Looks a lot like honey right now. Want to make sure it's thoroughly mixed and I'm going to add a little bit of mill fiber to it. This will make it stronger. Notice that doesn't affect the viscosity much and like I said, this as is, this tends to run out of joints. And so you think you have enough in there and it just gravity lets it drain out. And now I'll add - I'll add colloidal silica here. This is to thicken it up, make it stay where I put it a little bit better.

So that's starting to thicken it up and finally, this is going with that black plastic so I just think it looks better if it's black. So I'm going to add a little bit of graphite powder here. Doesn't take much to just turn the whole thing black. All right, so that's pretty black now. I'm going to put this in the pastry bag just to make it easier to distribute.

So I'm going to put a bead all the way around the perimeter here, likewise on here. And I'll do the same to the bow hatch. So there's some squeeze out here. I'm going to deal with that and this is why I dyed the glue black. This perimeter of epoxy that we see here will blend right in. It's hard to get enough clamps around the small hatch there, not a lot of room in there. Bunch of little solid model C-clamps can work pretty well and we don't want them springing off. Let's see if I've got some C-clamps. The reason I don't use C-clamps very often is that I get a little bit of epoxy on the threads of the screw and doesn't move anymore.

All right, I ought to do. So that's installing the bulkheads and the hatches. Tomorrow I will work on installing the deck lines, the seat, the backrest, the skeg. I still have the bottom of - so I might leave the skeg off a little bit later, but we're making good progress here and it's looking good.

So thanks for watching another episode of this build. If you've been enjoying this series and you've watched this far, I really appreciate your support. If you're interested in building one of these stitch and glue Petrel Plays, Chesapeake Light Craft makes the kit. I have plans available at Guillemot-Kayaks.com and I also have the plans available as a PDF download or a DXF download if you're interested in cutting your own kit on the CNC machine. So you should see some links to that up in the corner, but again I really appreciate your help. If you want to contribute to the production of these videos and future videos, I do have a Patreon site and any support you provide would be greatly appreciated. So until the next episode, thanks for watching and happy paddling.