Look at the bright side It could’ve been worse

The first bottom planking panel is on. 1 down, 3 to go. That is the good news, and that is the main point.

Getting there, however, didn’t go quite as smoothly as I’d hoped.

It was a Sunday night, and the pre-fitted panel was off of the boat. Before it got too late, I figured I’d go ahead and glue it down. After all, I would really like to get this boat in the water this year.

One small step was in the way: I still needed to finish encapsulating 3 limbers on frame #1. That takes a different type of epoxy than the stuff needed for gluing. No problem. I had 3 mixing containers.

Ominous foreshadowing #1: Not wanting to waste time, I’d only cleaned two of the three mixing cups.

The encapsulation part went fine. Just a few ounces of System 3 SilverTip. Quick and easy. On to mixing the GelMagic epoxy for gluing.

That went fine, too. That is, until I spread the last of it onto the final remaining inches of the boat frame, realizing as I did so that I had no epoxy left to spread onto the plywood.

Best practice is to coat both mating surfaces. Best practice is to use a clean mixing cup for each batch of epoxy. Now, I had one cup with still-curing SilverTip, one cup I didn’t bother to clean, and the last cup which I had just used.

Since the epoxy on the boat would start kicking off at any minute, I had to make a split-second decision: Either mix more GelMagic in one of the dirty cups, or hope what I’d put on the framework was enough on its own. With best practice being to coat both surfaces, I hurriedly scraped out the GelMagic cup as best I could & hoped there wouldn’t be a problem mixing more in it.

I quickly poured in about the same amount of resin. (That is, as “quickly” as one can “pour” GelMagic.)

I calculated the amount of hardener needed, quickly grabbed the bottle, opened it & upturned it....

...which is when I quickly found out I’d added the wrong hardener. GelMagic hardener is amber in color, and very viscous. This stuff was clear and flowed like water. It was the SilverTip hardener, not the GelMagic, and now I’d just wasted both.

I calmly murmured a string of socially-acceptable phrases, and pondered my next move.

I had more epoxy, but the last remaining mixing cup was full of junk. It still had hardened clumps of SilverTip thickened with mahogany sawdust clinging tenaciously to its inner walls. There was no time to clean it.

So, I made another rush decision & decided to use it. The clumps started breaking free as I mixed the batch of GelMagic. I picked them out as best I could as I spread the epoxy onto the plywood. That in itself added more time to an already urgent task.

It takes a long time to hand-drive 97 screws. It takes longer when you’re having to bend plywood against its will in the process. It took long enough, in fact, that by the time I drove the last screw into place the epoxy was so viscous I could barely manage scraping it with the putty knife. It was also late by this point. I was tired and exhausted.

I was so tired, in fact, that I forgot something very important. I forgot to reach underneath the planking and scrape away epoxy along the battens, where I will need to fit the butt blocks for joining the planking panels. Ugh...

Chipping away at THAT for the last 3 days has been fun, I assure you.

Oh well. The first bottom panel is on, and it is on solidly. That is the good news, and that is the main point.  

With the forward panel removed, this is how I marked the lines to cut butt blocks from a scrap of plywood.

The Utilitys framework & the Zips stem assembly.

First bottom panel epoxied on.

Fitting at the stem.

Transition joint.

My daughters Hello Kitty mirror was a huge help in chipping away at that epoxy.

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Whatever Happend to Do It Yourself

Boat plans from Popular Mechanics Magazine

Whenever I am giving a kayak building demonstration somewhere in a public space, some guy in his sixties or seventies will come up and say, "Yeah, I remember building one of these in the Boy Scouts."  The point worth mentioning here is that it is never a forty or thirty year old or even a fifty year old that comes up and says, "Yeah, I remember building one of these in the Boy Scouts."  My statistical sample isnt very large, but it seems to me that sometime in the post-WWII era, people built stuff and then they stopped.

So what happened? 
I have some theories. 
One of the factors that encouraged the do it yourself movement was prosperity and the high cost of wages.  Since most things consumed in the US were made in the US rather than imported, manufactured goods were relatively expensive because of the cost of labor.  So if you made something yourself, you could save on the cost of labor. Also, since manufacturing was still a big part of the US economy, the skills to make things were still valued and encouraged.  Schools were still expected to turn out graduates that could enter a job market where manual skills were valued. 

Folding kayak built from Popular Mechanics plans

And there were magazines like Popular Mechanics and Mechanix Illustrated to cater to do-it-yourselfers with plans and instructions. It seems like the golden age of  home made projects.
The other factor working against home made boats is the invention of roto-molded boats. This process eliminates most of the human labor from the making of a boat.  Kayaks and canoes can be made in a mold.  A little clean-up and some trim is all that needs to be added to make a finished boat.  The cost of these boats is so low compared to making your own that the effort hardly seems justified from a cost perspective.
Still, various plywood boat kit manufacturers seem to be making a living turning out kits for home builders. But a kit is not the same thing as making something off a set of plans out of a magazine.  I suspect that kits are popular because the general level of confidence to make something by hand has declined considerably since the middle of the twentieth century. 

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Chagudax

It used to be that the only way to get your memoir published was to be a famous person or an interesting writer or to have such an interesting life that someone else wanted to write your memoir for you, as told to style. The truth is that a lot of people have had interesting lives and it is too bad that more of them dont write memoirs, but then, what would we do with billions of memoirs.  Where would we store them all?  And if you think about it, a lot of the memoirs would be more or less similar or at least that is what people think.  And so, hardly anyone writes memoirs at least in statistically significant numbers and instead of there being a vast and repetitive glut of memoirs, theres a vast array of lives that have never been documented in print.
So it seems that Andrew Gronholdt had the sense that his life lived mostly in the Aleutians during a time when traditional Aleut culture was rapidly being overcome by the mainstream American culture might be worth putting down in writing.  Apparently, Gronholdt worked at his memoirs but but died without getting them published.  According to the book, Gronholdts daugher, Sharon Gronholdt and her friend, Mike Livingston decided to edit Andrews writings, lay out the book, add photos, many of them taken by Andrew and publish the book themselves though Blurb, a print on demand publisher.
So there it is.  Mike Livingston sent me a copy.  I have leafed through it, looked at the pictures and started reading it.
The title and the cover picture both made me think that the book was primarily about bent wood hat making.  But it isnt.  Its about Andrew Gronholdts life just off the Alaska Peninsula in the north Pacific in the Shumagin Islands, the place where Vitus Bering discovered Alaska and sea otters and set off the chain reaction that led to the colonization of Alaska by the Russians.
The Russians sold Alaska to the Americans who then began to work on Americanizing the native population.  By the time that Andrew Gronholdt was born, the Americanization was just about complete and much or even most of the Aleut culture was disappearing.  Andrew Gronholdt, however, must have had a sense that the culture needed preserving or in the case of wooden hat making, reviving from the death it had suffered a few decades earlier.
The book is lavishly illustrated with photos as well as some of Andrew Gronholdts sketches and working designs for various Aleut inventions, not only the hats but also bailing pumps, fox traps and other things that Andrew was interested in.
The book at a price of $109 a copy is probably not within everyones budget, but if you are interested in Aleut or Alaskan history at the beginning of the twentieth century, you may want to talk your library into getting a copy. Or if you do have the $109 you can get a copy at Blurb.
By the way if you think your own life or the life of someone you know is worth documenting, co-editor Mike Livingston encourages readers to just do it and put together a book and publish it through Blurb or one of the other self-publishing houses.  We probably dont need everyone to write a memoir but a few more might give the humans of the future a bigger window into the past.

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