The Mathematician and the Kayak
This is me. My name is Matt Noonan, and I'm a grad student in mathematics at Cornell
University in Ithaca, New York, a section of the country which carries
deep scars from ancient glacial
turmoil. The result is an area with beautiful gorges,
dramatic waterfalls, and long thin lakes. Ithaca is situated
right at the foot of the longest, Cayuga Lake -- 40 miles long and only
a mile and half at its widest point. Last spring I decided to
start taking advantage of all this good water.
On a grad student budget, I went out looking for a kayak on the
cheap. Unfortunately I discovered that "cheap" usually meant
"ugly and plastic" or "cheap compared to a new Kevlar boat".
Poking around on the internet one night looking for more kayak
information, I learned about Feathercraft
folding kayaks. Folding kayaks!? I had seen some pictures
of old Folbots before, but the Feathercraft boats were a revelation.
They looked beautiful, they broke down into a small bag, they
reassembled quickly, and they were seaworthy. In fact, many
people seemed to rave about the "feel"
of folders, the slight flex of the frame with the waves, the pressure
of water on the skin... but the price tags are a bit long. A lot
long, actually.
I started wondering if anybody had homebuilt folding kayaks. I
found several different builders, although the results were often
either very flimsy looking or more like "de- and re-buildable" kayaks
than actual folders. Then I found Tom Yost's amazing designs,
complete with amazingly detailed instructions. And the
price? Amazingly free. Tom estimated that the materials for
one of his kayaks would cost well under $500 -- less than the amount I
was going to spend on a used plastic boat. Used?
Plastic? Tom got me hooked. I was going to build a folder.
This is the journal
of my attempt at building a folder, Tom Yost's Sea Rider.
I've been living in a small apartment without any tools and it has been
years since I've built much of anything. Studying math is very
intellectually rewarding, but sometimes at the end of the day you want
something that you can hold in your hands and say "I made this." Starting this
project I had only a few small hand tools. No power tools,
materials, or workspace, and a limited budget. These two pictures
show you the two workspaces I am using to build the kayak.
I don't want to jinx the outcome, so I won't say any more about the
project here. Suffice to say that in a few weeks, there will be a
picture of me on this website, floating in a new folding kayak, with a
caption saying "I made this."
-- Matt Noonan
Friday, 6 August 2004
I'm still missing
most of the things I need to build the kayak frame (lumber for the
strongback, jigsaw, HDPE and plywood to name a few), but I had a good
time today cutting up the aluminum tubes for
stringer inserts on the porch and riveting things together. It
gave me some time to get comfortable with the aluminum -- it's much
easier to work with than I had expected. I put a couple of hours
of work in this afternoon and built almost all of the stringer
tubes. I was just using a cheap little tube cutter, and
eventually hanging on to the tube while trying to rotate the cutter
starting wearing at my poor mathie hands. Lesson #1 for the day:
use some gloves with a good grip or otherwise clamp the tube down.
Lesson #2 came shortly after I finished cutting the first 6" insert:
tubes should probably be drilled before
cutting. Lucky thing aluminum drills so nicely. 
Tom recommended a
drill press to drill the holes in order to keep the rivet job nice and
tight, but a drill press is a bit out of my budget. I ended up
setting the rivets far enough apart that new holes could be drilled
later to re-rivet the inserts into the tubes if needed.
I had a pretty sorry time trying to set some of the rivets. Maybe
this is the penalty for buying the cheapest rivet puller I could
find? I did dozens of rivets and eventually got into a routine
that worked, but resulted in pretty ugly rivets. The inserts seem
to be riveted in to the tubes pretty solidly, so I guess all is well
that ends well.
Saturday, 7 August 2004
I finished up the last of the tubes today. The very last rivet I
pulled was perfect. Too perfect, I guess... it looks out of place.
Monday, 9 August 2004
I borrowed my friend Josh's car today and took a trip to the
lumberyard. I brought back 40' of 2x4 and 14' of 1x6, just one
foot more than Tom's strongback plans call for. I couldn't get a
half-sheet of plywood, so I ended up buying a 4'x8' sheet -- about
twice as much as I need. Probably the other half will become
Saramoira's kayak in the future.
I didn't get back from the lumberyard until six in the afternoon and my
driveway workspace, while usually well-lit, tends to go totally dark about once a day.
Still, that gave me enough time to build the strongback. This is
the 13' base on which the kayak frame will be built, so it has to be
stable along the entire length. 13 feet is too long to move up
and down the staircase every day, so I chopped the strongback in half
and added some blocks to the cut which can be bolted together to
quickly reassemble things. The blocks seems to add sufficient
support to the cut area, and the entire structure is pretty
solid. I marked out the locations of the cross-sections on the
strongback and tested the positioning of the kneebrace (section 4) and
footbrace (section 3). The fit is perfect! A few weeks ago
I tried to figure out the dimensions of a Greenland kayak built to my anthropometric
measurements. Tom's Sea Rider design is almost exactly right
for me.
I also had time to chop up the plywood and start marking out the
cross-sections. I started with section 8 since it is one of the
smallest. Even though it defines a tiny slide of the stern,
getting the shape down on wood was really exciting. The first
boat-like shape to appear! Saramoira offered great support at
this point by not making fun of me for pointing excitedly at a tiny
figure drawn on a bit of plywood.
After dinner I was
eager to draw the rest of the cross-sections and start getting a feel
for the shape of the boat. Lesson #3: don't make critical
measurements late at night, especially if you need to do complicated
stuff like figure out how many inches 0.714 feet is.
Mathematicians are notoriously bad at calculation -- we can never enjoy
eating out, with the troublesome tip calculation looming on the
horizon. I once sat through a particularly difficult lecture in
abstract algebra, after which the professor had trouble computing 31
minus 7 to tell us the day of our final. This picture represents
something like "measure twice, cut once", except more along the lines
of "measure twice, draw once, that
can't be right, measure again, draw again, measure twice, draw
two more times, this still looks
weird." I'll cut tomorrow with a clear head, now is the
time for sleep.
Sorry for the offcenter pictures. I've been using a small digital
camera which isn't SLR-style.
You don't know what you have until its gone...
Tuesday, 10 August 2004
The morning was nice and cool for a change, so as soon as the dew
evaporated I went out to my workbench/driveway and started cutting out
the cross-sections. There is a boat coming out of here, I can see
it! Lining those 8 cross-sections up on the grass and visualizing
the shape of the final boat was wonderful. Tom has designed a
beautiful kayak here.
I did a bit more work on the strongback today, building the supports
for stations 1 and 8. Tom's designs all use 1/2" thick HDPE
sheets for the cross-sections, but HDPE is a bit too expensive for
me. Instead, on Tom's recommendation, I'm using exterior grade
plywood for the cross-sections with HDPE snap connectors screwed in
place. The snaps provide a place for the aluminum tubes to attach
to the cross-sections and are a vital part of the design, so I ordered
a 12"x18" HDPE cutting
board for $10 to cut up an make into snaps and assorted
parts. It arrived by UPS today, so I spent some time in between
the scattered afternoon rainshowers cutting up the cutting board.
The cutting board has rounded edges, which is slightly annoying but not
really problematic.
I also ordered a Forstner drill bit for cutting the ubiquitous 3/4"
holes that are all over this design. In particular, I can't
finish the snaps until it arrives, so work on the frame is at an
impasse. I got an email today telling me that it was sent by
first-class mail yesterday. Here's to a speedy delivery...
Wednesday, 11 August 2004
No pictures today, I was too busy building! The drill bit arrived in the
mail today from Wildwood
Designs. It was a good deal cheaper for me to get the bit online and
shipped to Ithaca than buy one in town. After spending some time getting
used to the bit and making a drill guide I got out the cutting board and
started making snaps. Tom's original design calls for making the
cross-sections out of HDPE (same plastic as used in most cutting boards)
which has the advantage of letting you snap the tubes directly onto the
cross-sections. Getting a sheet of HDPE is pretty expensive, so I used
plywood with HDPE snaps. To make the snaps, I cut the middle section of
the cutting board into about 50 rectangular tabs, each 1 1/8" x 2". Next
I clamped everything down hard and used the drill guide (made out of an
extra bit of the cutting board) to cut 3/4" holes into the ends of the
tabs. Tom's design has the holes drilled so that only two-thirds of the
hole by height are in the tab, making a nice snap. Since I was drilling
by hand instead of in a drill press, I found that it helped to set the
holes a hair farther into the tabs. At first these snaps don't quite fit
around the aluminum tubes, but if you slide one on the end and rock it
back and forth until it pops off, the plastic changes shape a bit and you
end up with a great snap.
Next I cut up the first four cross-sections, hollowing out the middle of
the cross sections and curving the edges to keep them away from the skin
during use. The snaps were then (temporarily) screwed onto the plywood
cross-sections. This was tricky, since I had to cut the plywood back in
order to get the snap in the right spot. After building the first four
cross-sections, I see why Tom is so enamored with HDPE sections. Next
time, I'll save up the extra $75 and make them out of solid HDPE.
At this point, the air started getting heavier with pre-sunset dew, so I
packed up the tools and got ready to wrap up for the day. But I couldn't
resist snapping the new cross-sections onto some tubes and get an idea of
what the bow would look like (answer: beautiful!)
Tomorrow I'll make the rest of the cross-sections and hopefully start
building up the frame.
Thursday, 12 August 2004
Today was a cursed day for boatbuilding. It rained all day, which meant I
couldn't do any more construction work on the boat. I finished marking
out the final shapes and snap placements of sections 5 through 8 and
also make the coaming pattern. The coaming looks huge compared to the
low area cross-sections!
All day yesterday I was stubbing my toe on unlikely things (3/4" aluminum,
heating grates, cereal bowl). While working on the coaming today I
dropped 8 square feet onto my big toe, edge-on. It hit just behind the
nail and bled like mad, so I've now left my blood and my sweat on various
parts of this boat. At least there's been no occasion for tears yet...
Another bad sign today, and lesson #4: measure, measure, measure!
I bought 12 feet of 5/8" tube to make tent-pole style inserts along the
stringers. Turns out I really needed more like 14' to 16', if I'm to make
the connectors at the ends of the gunwales and chines 12" long (these were
the numbers used in Tom's Sea Ranger photos). Since the Sea Rider is a
smaller boat, I underbuild these inserts a few inches each and managed to
squeeze out the proper number. Each insert will still go at least 5" into
the tubes, so I hope to still get a solid and strong connection. Fingers
crossed!
Weather forecast says rain all day tomorrow.
Friday, 13 August 2004
No rain, but the morning was misty enough that I couldn't do any work with
power tools outside. I stocked up on more screws and got a tube bender.
Things dried out by the afternoon and I fabricated the rest of the snaps,
then finished building cross-sections five through eight. Doesn't sound
like much, but it used up most of the non-wet daylight I had today.
Saturday, 14 August 2004
Productivity!
Despite foul forecasts, the weather today was great. I got
out early in the morning and started assembling the frame. Tom is
absolutely right --- it's amazing how quickly a bunch of aluminum and some
plywood starts to resemble a boat. This picture is from the back of the
kayak before the chines and gunwales have been trimmed. Getting the frame
together makes it really easy to see where
mistakes were made. Somehow I messed up the deckridge on sections five,
six and seven so that there is a sharp ridge instead of a mostly flat aft
deck. It still looks pretty good, but more in the style of Tom's
Symmetrik folder than the Greenland style. Looks like it would be painful
to lay back on the deck. I'll try altering the rear deckridge
tomorrow if the hurricane doesn't send too much rain this way.
At this point a couple of the snaps came off of the plywood. They are
currently wood-screwed to the plywood, but I think that on some rainy day
in the near future I'll drill the holes a bit larger and use bolts
instead. The snaps themselves work great.
Bending the tubes was a lot of fun. This was the first place where you
can really fine-tune various curves on the boat and see how the result
will fit with the final shape since I didn't need to fair the stringers
too much (only a few small adjustments, leveling and trimming the gunwales
and chines at the ends got the stringers in almost perfect shape). While
making the deckridge for the front deck, I discovered that I had also
screwed up sections 1 and 2 -- both had the deckridge running way too
high. After sawing them down an inch or so, everything fit perfectly.
This second picture shows the bend leading up to where the coaming
will sit. The final bend angle was slightly higher than in this
photo. While bending the keel up in the front, I bent it a bit
too far.
To compensate, I
made
a small second bend closer to the tip of the kayak, giving the front a
sort of mild compound curve. It came out looking pretty good, but the
second bend was not quite in the same plane as the first, so I'll need to
tweak this a bit more. A tube bender with built-in level would have
helped a lot here.
Later, I finished building the wood parts of the coaming. The coaming is
based off of Tom's HDPE coaming pattern but in plywood and came out
looking pretty good. It still needs velcro (for attaching to the skin)
and foam (to seal the opening) added. I also started work on the
baseplates which the chines and gunwales will bolt to, but didn't get too
far. I guess I spent too much time staring at the new frame today! It
really looks great, I can't wait to skin it. Mauritzon is shipping the
Coverlight out on Monday. If I had known the frame would come together so
fast, I would have ordered it earlier! But I still have a lot of detail
work to do -- sanding the cross-sections and coaming, treating the wood
(any suggestions?), fabricating the bolt-through plates, fixing the
small torsion of the bow stem, and lowering the aft deckridge. I guess
that should keep me busy until the PVC skin arrives... if not, I can
always start carving up a Greenland paddle!
Sunday, 15 August 2004
Day of rest. Did manage to win a game of Go.
Monday, 16 August 2004
Another lovely day in Ithaca, once the morning dampness burned off. I
spent the early afternoon combing the city for shock cord and some cedar
to carve into a paddle (no luck on the cedar). The home improvement
stores had no idea about shock cord, but the outdoor store had a spool at
40 cents a foot. It was a bit thicker than I had hoped for, but it'll do
fine. I bought twelve feet and wound up about a foot short.
The whole frame is shock-corded now. I also added the rivets which mark
off the cross-section locations and built up the pegs to hold the
footbrace (cross section #3) in place. I couldn't find any nylon or
aluminum spaces like Tom's plans show, so I bought a pack of long-reach
rivets and some washers with 1/8" holes. Stack five up, run the rivet
through them, voila! Nice looking, solid pegs. I'm really pleased
with how they turned out.
With the shock cords and rivets in, the frame assembles and breaks down
really fast. I'd guess assembly times for the finished kayak would be
under 15 minutes!
I also did some sanding work on the coaming before finishing the wood. I
didn't expect the plywood to sand well, but actually the result is very
smooth and nice looking. This picture is from Saturday, showing a
different view of the coaming ring.
I still need to do some modifications to the cross-sections. The major
one is lowering the back deck to the proper height, but today I also
found that the chines appear to be twisted near sections 2 and 7 (#7
starred in the "measure twice, cut once" picture above). I went
up and down the kayak with a level to check the relative alignment of the
chines and the gunwales. Placing the level right next to the
cross-sections lets you pinpoint where the problem areas are. After
removing sections 2 and 7 (the level showed them off the mark) the chines
leveled with the gunwales except very near section 1. The most likely
culprit is misaligned snaps -- it really is not easy to get them in the
proper place. Solid HDPE construction instead of HDPE snaps on plywood
would have circumvented this problem entirely. Tomorrow, I'm going to
level this kayak.
Tuesday, 17 August 2004
I spent a few hours today messing with the alignment again instead of
lowering the aft deck. It was really driving me crazy, but I finally
found one more spot which was out of alignment -- one of the gunwale snaps
on cross section 1. Now that I understand where all the twist in the
kayak was, I feel more at ease about modifying the deck.
I
decided that since I was in there tweaking things, I might as well try an
experiment I had been wondering about. I've always liked the look of the
Greenland kayaks with a compound S-shaped keel, making a sort of built-in
mini-skeg. Tom's designs seem to show (and the Molinas are certainly helping
him prove!) that the aluminum/HDPE combo can emulate the traditional
design as well as you please. With this in mind, I bent an extra curve
into the end of the
keel. The curve is mild so that I didn't need to adjust any
cross-sections or fundamentally change Tom's design. I was also worried
about skinning a curve that was too complex. If you were willing to do
the hull in several parts I think you could make the curves arbitrarily
sharp, but I wanted to build a one-piece hull for simplicity. If it
doesn't seem to be working I'll just screw a carved bit of plastic onto
the bottom to fill out the extra bend.
Wednesday, 18 August 2004
Lots of work today! I went out in the morning and bought about 50
one-and-a-quarter inch machine screws.
Previously I had been attaching
the snaps to the plywood using wood screws, but these didn't seem to be
holding up well to the snapping and unsnapping process. Any twisting
force on the tubes would cause the snaps to rise a bit out of the plywood,
or sometimes come off completely. So on each snap I replaced one of the
wood screws (usually the closest to the tube) with a bolted-through
machine screw. Now all the snaps are very firmly in place. Bolting the
snaps on is absolutely the way to go, regular wood screws have basically
no grip on the plywood.
Next I cut the four rear cross sections, removing the peaked deck. I cut
some inch-wide strips out of spare plywood and bolted them across the cut,
and finally added the snaps back on. It came out great, the low deck not
only makes it easier to lay back in the boat but it also makes entry and
exit much simpler. You can see the rebuilt cross-section 5 (backrest) in
this picture.
I also made three of the four plastic bits along the
keel which the deckridge and chines bolt through, and melted down the ends
of the shock-cord to prevent them from fraying. The frame is now quite
solid and finally level along the length. I still need to make the last
plastic plate for the keel, build the flooring and add two deck supports
between sections 5 and 6. The details add up!
Thursday, 19 August 2004
There was scattered showers all day today, so working wasn't much of an
option. What to do? Cover the kayak in saran wrap and take it for a
spin, of course!
I bought a roll of saran-wrapesque stuff from the local U-Haul shop. This
is the same stuff they use for wrapping up furniture to keep drawers from
falling out while moving, and seems to be a weaker version of the clear
plastic used on shipping pallets. The plastic was a funky green color, so
after wrapping about 500 square feet of it onto the boat, I had a nice
translucent green kayak.
Earlier I had bought a cheap foam sleeping pad
to cut up for seals on the coaming. I trimmed it down a bit and used it
as a makeshift seat: one continuous layer across the floor, then up and
down to form a slightly rounded backrest. I added another pad to the seat
area (leftover oval from cutting the coaming seal). This seat actually
turned out to be very comfortable and with some modifications, I might use
it as the final product. The paddle came from a local outfitter ("you
guys rent kayaks, right?" "yep" "could I just rent a paddle?" "uhm...").
Once I explained what I was doing and showed of my roll of plastic wrap,
the guy seemed pretty interested. Turned out he built a canoe a few years
back.
I tossed the paddle, PFD, and extra saran wrap and tape into the kayak and
walked
down to Six Mile Creek, which feeds into the inlet at the south end
of Cayuga Lake. There is an actual boat ramp in a part a bit farther
upstream, but the creek is too shallow there to launch. On the other
hand, downstream of the boat ramp there is a wall about 4 feet high along
the banks. I decided to jump down into the creek and then bring the kayak
in behind me. Hey, whaddya know, it floats!
I've never been in a Greenland-style kayak before, so the tiny 19.5" beam
and tight cockpit were new experiences for me. The low deck made it easy
to sit just behind the cockpit and slide a foot in. I expected such a
narrow kayak to be very tippy, but after some head-scratching to figure
out the proper angles I managed to slide in without incident. What a
great fit! We had rented some nice composite touring kayaks from Puddledockers last fall and I had
thought those were snug, but the Sea Rider really was like an
extension of the body. I paddled downstream a bit, enjoying the scenery
of this part of the creek (BMX bike, shopping cart, highway bridge). Hmm,
is that water on my toes?
After dumping out the kayak in a
shallow area I got back in and started playing with the balance. The
first thing I noticed was that the initial stability was much higher than
I had expected. I never felt that the kayak was about to go over on me,
despite the fact that I haven't had much paddling experience. Next I got
the kayak up on edge to explore the secondary stability. Again, it far
exceeded my expectations. I could actually lean the kayak so far over
that water was pouring over the coaming into the cockpit without
capsizing! I could also comfortably lay straight back on the back deck,
arms and paddle in, without feeling tippy at all. It was also a
revelation to see how nicely a well-fitting boat
responds to your movements. I can tell this will be a fun kayak already.
While getting in and out to bail the kayak, I managed to crack the coaming
(actually just the coaming baseplate, I wasn't using the entire coaming)
and the newly-added crossbar on section 5. If the weather is ok tomorrow
I'll probably rebuild cross section 5 from scratch using a mostly solid
piece of plywood. I already had plans to add a day-hatch like opening
behind the cockpit, so blocking off access from behind the seat isn't
such a big deal and this cross section would benefit the most from extra
strength. The keel snap on cross section 8 also was a big damaged, so
I'll need to find a solid way of patching that up as well. Solid plastic
cross sections next time!
Saturday, 21 August 2004
Yesterday, not too much work done on the kayak. I borrowed a friend's car
and drove a few towns over to Baker-Miller Lumber in Groton to go get a
nice 16' cedar 2x4 for paddle carving. These guys have a great
lumberyard, and had exactly
what I needed. Really nice selection of tools, too. Wish they were in
town so I could go there more often. On the other hand, maybe it is
better that I can't get there easily..
Today, I rebuilt all the parts I broke during my saran wrap test (gee,
maybe I should have waterproofed the plywood before taking it into
the creek?). This meant rebuilding sections 8 and 5 and making a new
baseplate for the coaming. I made section 5 solid plywood this time
instead of cutting out the center. This should give plenty of strength
while I'm sliding in and out of the cockpit. It is a bit annoying to not
have cockpit access to the area just behind the seat, but I'm going to
leave it like this for now. I don't know if Tom's designs are
particularly modular or if this is a feeling every builder gets, but
making this boat has also given me confidence that I can easily make
changes later.
Monday, 23 August 2004
Sunday and early Monday were spent coating every wooden bit with
spar urethane. This meant that I had to label and remove every
plastic snap that I had placed on the cross sections, put several
coats of urethane on, then replace all the snaps. Miraculously,
everything came out level again when I was finished. The spar
urethane also gave a nice color to the coaming. No complaints
about the way this kayak is looking!
Today, the Coverlight for the skin finally arrived! I went out and
picked up various solvents (acetone and MEK) to go along with the HH-66
vinyl glue for Mauritzon. The HH-66 smells like the rubber cement we had
in grade school, with a hint of plastic model glue. There is no
"ingredient" list, but the HH-66 claims to contain these HAZARDOUS
CHEMICALS: toluene, MEK (methyl ethyl ketone) and acetone. I tried to
find out what goes in to rubber cement, but the only common ingredients
seem to be acetone. Sorry I couldn't give more information for anybody
trying to homebrew the HH-66.
This Coverlight looks like pretty tough stuff. I was a bit suprised at
how easily it cuts with scissors, but some experimentation showed that it
was very hard to puncture or to rip. Unless I paddle onto a scissor
junkyard, I figure the hull will hold up well.
Tuesday, 24 August 2004
Today I did some work on the paddle, mostly just trying to figure out
how to make a nice even cut at such a shallow slope to make the blades
(from the blade tips to the paddle shaft is a slope of just 1/12" per
foot!) I'm using Chuck Holst's plans, linked to above. In the end I
found that I could start at the blade tips, cut a shallow notch into one
side and then the other, then extend each notch until the two cuts met up.
Once that happens, the saw follows the proper angle for the rest of the
cut. This is just the first step of cutting out the blank, might be that
I'll be paddling with a rented paddle again when I launch. Working with
the cedar is wonderful, the wood is soft and the aroma is amazing. Glad I
didn't settle for stud-grade pine.
Wednesday, 25 August 2004
Classes start tomorrow, better get to work! Learned how to work with the
vinyl glue today and started making the hull. First thing was to cut the
hull fabric in half (it comes in 60" sheets, but 30" is more than enough
for one boat) and strech it over the upside-down kayak frame. Next, you
need to go along and lace up the hull from the center to the ends,
tightening as you go. While I was doing this, a passer-by asked if I was
using carbon fiber. I guess that means it is looking pretty slick!
The lacing in the right picture actually runs the entire length of the
kayak. Half of the nylon thread was dark green, which is basically
invisible in the picture. Some of the tubes wanted to pop off of some of
the lower quality snaps, so I held them down with zip ties. This didn't
seem to interfere with the skinning process at all. I think that with the
skin on the tubes will be held in place, but if not I can always fabricate
some replacement snaps.
The Sea Rider's deck is made out of five pieces of fabric: one for the
rear deck, two for the curved front deck, and two around the sides of the
coaming. Before the day was through I also glued the first front deck
piece on. The end is in sight! I've set a tenative launch date for
Saturday. Too hopeful? We'll see.
Thursday, 26 August 2004
Lots of successful work today! I only worked for about 3 hours, but that
was enough time to complete the skin. The rear deck was fairly easy, and
after messing with the alignment the second front deck piece went on
nicely. I had the most trouble with the coaming area. Luckily before
skinning I discovered that I had put the coaming ring on slightly
off-center. One nice thing about the Coverlight skins is even if you mess
up, you can cut off the error piece and glue a correction over the area.
I think it would be very difficult to make an unrecoverable error in the
skin.
Not much else to report today, so I'll post before and after pictures and
call it a night. Tomorrow is a busy day!
a
work in progress...