Tuesday, March 4, 2008

More Clamps!

As you can see I've reached a point where the 10 clamps Leighann gave me for Christmas have come in handy, and even those were not enough. Here I'm using 25 clamps to securely hold the "sheer clamp" piece of wood to the side panel as the epoxy cures over night. Lining up the sheer clamp was a challenge, Leighann helped by being at one end of the piece while I was at the other. We lowered the sheer clamp down on top of the side panel which I had already brushed with epoxy. The trick (one of them) is to make sure the sheer clamp extends over the long edge of the side panel by .25". I made this easier by earlier scribing a line along the side panel to guide us in positioning the sheer clamp. Unfortunately I had used a red pencil which, I found out during the glue/alignment process, is really hard to see when the epoxy is on it.

So, hopefully everything is nicely aligned and equally coated in epoxy. I will be repeating the same step for the mirror side to the boat. Learning from this last step, I will not be using red pencil to mark alignments. 

These will be nice steps to check off in the build as once these sheer clamps are glued down I can start stitching together the panels and making this thing look like a kayak!

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