Catching up, seat and coaming

Wow, time flies - to catch you, dear reader, up on what's transpired since my last post. I've:

• finished cutting gunwales and stringers;
• glued (epoxied) gunwales and stringers to stems;
• glued deck supports back together;
• coating plywood with epoxy (cut edges with 2).

Most recently, I did a big shopping trip at Home Depot and Lowes to buy the parts for the kayak seat and coaming. The seat followed Tom's instructions pretty closely. The biggest difference is that I cut the ends of the screws off where the seat connects to cross section #2. I did this to try and keep Paige from getting scratched when she pulls her feet out.

The coaming, too follows Tom's instructions pretty closely - well, ok, for the actual building portion. To draw out the coaming, I took the offsets from Tom and laid out the coaming in Visio. I found that Visio didn't give me a clean enough arc, so I asked a graphic designer friend to take the file and massage it in his whiz-bang tools. The end result is this Sea Flea 11 coaming template. I used my trusty Staples printing service (printed 24" X 36" for $3.99) and I had a full-size coaming template.

The template is of the coaming's inner-diameter. I took my template and laid it out on the 1/4" plywood. I drilled out a spot for my jig saw and cut the inner portion out. I made a little measuring stick for marking the outer diameter. I drew and then cut out the outside edge of the coaming lip.

I used the coaming lip to draw out the inner-diameter of the base ring and two riser rings onto 1/2" plywood. I did the same for cutting these out and made a new measuring stick for marking the outer diameter of these rings.

My rings are not symmetrical, but for me - they're close enough.

I then epoxied the base ring to the boat and glued the 2 risers and coaming lip together. Monday night, I painted on the 1st coat of epoxy. And last night, I put the 2nd coat of epoxy onto the cut edges and entire coaming lip.

In the coming nights, I plan to make and install the coaming stanchons.

In other news, I put in eyelets to make installing and removing the flotation bags easier. I used the drill-fill-drill approach for installing this fastener.

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