I love it! What a beautiful boat you've built!

Are you telling me that somehow you can use a heat gun to separate parts that have been fiberglassed together? That might be useful in the future if I knew something about your technique.

Jeff

jeff, 

yes, a heat gun will turn epoxy/glass to an almost peanut-butter consistency and with a scraper or chisel or other appropriate tool, it basically comes right off/right apart.

a good video showing this (done by Nick Schade) can be viewed at the following link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHNHXD-g2N0

(in this video he strips the glass off a wood kayak, refinishes it and reglasses it)

my last project was a strip built night heron....and during that build i learned a lot about fixing mistakes.....becuase, well, mistakes happen.

for this kind of a fix, the trick with a heat-gun is getting the heat hot enough but not burning the wood.  the technique, once mastered, is pretty straight-forward and actually pretty fast......but you need to be careful....at the temperatures you need to work at, you can easily burn the wood if you don't keep the heat source moving. 

the challenge on this boat and dealing with the previous owners efforts, was not so much getting glass and epoxy off.....but dealing with joints and just the mess of it all.

i wanted to re-use all the parts....and getting everything clean enough to come back together the way i wanted just took time.  as i mentioned in my original post, he really did not seem to understand how the panels were supposed to be glued and he just seemed to randomly epoxy/glass taped them together.  it was initially a bit intimidating....but i saw all the pieces were there and just took my time.

get some scrap wood, glass and epoxy and give it a try....its a pretty cool technique.

howard

Howard,

Very impressive!  You've probably banked a lot of good karma for the rescue.

Cheers,

Dick

You done good.

The heat gun works to relax the wood fibers when bending wood too.    

I must have done something wrong.  I tried to take an epoxy joint apart with a heat gun once and the wood started smoking and the joint still hadn't  loosened up.

that can certainly happen.

i can't claim it will always work easily.....there are some factors that one has to manage.

first, you need to get enough heat that the whole joint is up to temperature....not just the surface.  and you need to be able to deliver the heat without burning the wood.

that's why i said it took a long time to 'undo' it all.  i had to treat it like slow-cooking meat....vs burning the meat on the outside and having it raw on the inside.

to quote myself....'a couple painstaking sessions with a heat gun and i was able to get back to the original bits....  the getting things apart and clean up was long and tedious as i did not want to damage the wood. '

so i worked with my heat gun to get it just the temperature below burning (using test pieces...and i did burn some test pieces) then i heated the wood including flipping it over and heating the other side...and slowly wiggling it.  i probably spent thirty minutes per joint and i had to use oven mets to be able to handle the hot pieces.  but i am pretty certain i had the entire joint surface very hot and i had the wood hot through and through,  and this was 4 mm panels.  so i can also imagine that if i was working with thicker pieces...it simply may not be possible to get the heat penetration necessary to get the whole joint surface hot enough to allow the epoxy to loosen.

anyway....it was a chore.  i hope the further description is helpful.

h

Makes you winder how many of these kits that someone started years ago are laughishing half finished in someone's basement or garage.

A friend of mine bought a half finished Alcort Sailfish kit that someone started building circa 1960, and never finished, for ten bucks at a garage sale. All of the parts and the original instructions were still in the box.

Is it my imagination, or did you modify the shape of the deck forward of the cockpit from the original plans? Compared to the image CLC has on their site for the Shearwater 17, it looks like you created a more leg room...

Great looking kayak!

i think its just the angle of the shot.  but it's a shearwater built per the designers lines.

saw your other post about looking for sleekness with a bit more room.  the shearwater has the properties you are looking for as well....but size 12 feet won't be accomodated by the shearwater and most 'sleek' designs.

that said,   you can get sleek if you build a strip deck and tweak the lines to accomodate your shoe size.  easy to do on a long boat.  i posted a picture of my modified night heron....easily up to a size 11  but i could have raised the deck another centimeter or so and it would have looked just as good and accomodated a size 12 shoe.

happy to help with any ideas.

h