I most certainly will.
Si
Excellent. I will give lots of advance notice of the maiden voyage - the date is constrained not only by progress of construction, but by tides. I need to pick a date when I can set off on the high tide and return on the next one.
Major gluing work carried out last night - the stiffening ribs are now all in place. Next job is to fillet the seams.
How’s yours, Bobotheoptimist? (and the eye?)
Finished cutting last night, realized I need to do some serious sanding to get the seams to meet. Can’t quite visualize how the parts are supposed to go together (I’m not using the basic “Prism” after all, but one of the versions that he apparently never built)
So far I’ve pointy wood and some semi-pointy wood
Eye is ok - mild scratch, I think. Wasn’t hurting in the morning, but irrigating it that night was unpleasant.
Which one are you building? Is it the Box Prism?
You should only need to round off the corners to get the ply to join - it’s not as bad as it seems and the curves that result from joins between two curved boards are incredibly robust.
I’m already mentally planning my next boat - I fancy making a coracle.
-If it’s the box prism, your exploded view should look something like this
Dory 82, I believe it’s called. I’m sure it’ll come together when I start gluing, I just have a hard time wrapping my head around bent wood - I like straight lines.
I also want a coracle, but I’m making this one for the kids (my luxury yacht is enough boat for me) and I don’t think they’d fully appreciate it.
Also, I’m going to use some Wacky Noodles in the final stages of construction, as suggested by this site. Around the gunwales both for safety and to cut down on damage to my cars roof, and maybe near the waterline for stability (more for their confidence than because I think it’ll flip easily)
Might not be as attractive, but for the kids I don’t mind giving up aesthetics for increased floatyness.
Instead of the pool noodles, you could use hard foam pipe insulation - because this has a split in it and a hollow centre, you could wrap it over the gunwale.
How stiff is your plywood? 1/4" is >6mm - that seems like it might not be all that bendy.
BTW, that’s a nice-looking canoe you have - what’s it made of?
Canoe is made of the revolutionary SuperLink3™ (aka “plastic”) fairly durable so far.
1/4" might turn out to be far too stiff, but if so I think I can slop together something that’ll work, if not something to be proud of.
I’ve removed all my stitches and filletted and radiused the inside seams now…
The ribs I added yesterday have really stiffened up the structure.
Are planning on glassing the outside?
Brian
p.s. I’ve posted it before, but here is my build log:
www.acegroup.cc/~brianm/kayak
(seems to be down as of this writing)
No, the outside seams will be filled and smoothed, then they’ll probably get a brushed layer of epoxy before priming and several coats of paint. Glassing the outside would make it all too heavy, I think - especially with the filler coat that would be needed to smooth over the weave. It’s only for occasional light leisure use, so I’m not worried about making the outer hull invulnerable to damage.
I’ve finished most of the seam glassing now - sig link goes to a new page
Any further progress, Bob?
Mine continues at a fair pace, but I’m currently at a point where I don’t like the look of the thing - I’m hoping this is just a temporary effect - all this effort to end up with an ugly boat would be quite disheartening.
Well, if you don’t like the look of yours, you don’t want to see this (sorry for the cell-phone quality images), the only positive thing I can come up with about mine is that it’s larger than I expected. Yours looks very nice, imho.
1/4" is indeed too thick for a nice bend - things broke no matter what I tried so I had to change things slightly. Tossed in some supports primarily to hold things while the glue dries but will probably leave them in to hold seat and oarlocks and the like.
I remember now why, when I was younger, my cars all had great engines but looked as if I’d just rescued the body from a salvage yard - taping and epoxying this thing is frighteningly like doing body work on a car.
I have much sanding ahead of me… 
Apparently the server that hosted my website has crashed. The ISP (phone company) has decided to not offer free web service anymore.
(they not only did not have a back up, they did not have a record of who had a web site – yes, I have a back-up of the contents)
They have an discount offer for paid web hosting, but I’m not sure if it is worth it or not.
Brian
Heh. Do you remember an old computer game called Elite? Reminds me of something out of that. I think it will look good when it’s finished and painted. You’re going to have to do something clever to get your gunwales around those tight corners, but your boat should have excellent stability on the water.
Thanks - I’m hoping that it’s just the regression back to cable ties and masking tape that’s giving me the impression I have. I reckon it will be OK in the end.
I’m just about to move my site onto proper hosting - I currently have the domain redirected to the site hosted on FreeWebs, but that isn’t ideal for a number of reasons (can’t bookmark to a subdomain/subdirectory of atomicshrimp.com is the main one). Freewebs is otherwise pretty OK considering it doesn’t cost anything - bit of a pain to upload stuff, as they don’t give you FTP access - you have to do it using their uploader tools (which until fairly recently, meant you had to do it one file at a time, unless you pay a premium).