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Duct Tape Kayak – Build Day 5

Posted by on July 24, 2012

Today we powered through an epic build session that extended late into the night. Work continued on gluing the frame together and figuring out any kinks that came up along the way. This included re-working the lines of the bow and stern section, adjusting a few of the stations along the keel, and working around a couple of sticky situations!

The bow section came together perfectly and really stiffened up with the addition of the glue. This took away a lot of the rocker leaving the keel line fairly flat as we had initially hoped. The stern section gave us a few issues. There was something about the lines that didn’t (and still doesn’t) seem quite right but I’m hoping that better light during our next build session will help to iron this out.

Brett gets the “Engineer of the Night” award for today’s build session! At one point in the gluing process we made an error that we thought we’d never come back from. That was until Brett came to the rescue with a heat gun and we were able to “un-cure” the glue and save the station that we were working with. The heat gun also came in handy for bending some of the PVC pipes to fit better.

Other engineering break-throughs came in the form of zip-ties and string. Brett suggested that we add zip-ties to help attach the keel to the stations along with the glue. This worked out great and made me feel even more confident that our custom parts would hold the keel! Alex then suggested that we use some string to help provide tension in a few of the less-stable areas. These tension strings did a great job of stiffening up the extended bow and stern sections where it’s hard to fit in PVC struts due to the extreme angles.

Duct tape is just around the corner…

-Kayak Dave

Click here to donate to the Kayak Dave’s Duct Tape Kayak team and help support Stand Up 2 Cancer!

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