Hello all,

You may remember my badly damaged strip-built kayak that I've been working on. Here is a pic of the deck with two coats of epoxy. There was some checking between the strips where once it dried out the wood separated a tiny bit. I'm talking fractions of a millimeter, but it had to be dealt with. I coated the whole thing with West System 207 (awesome stuff by the way- very thin, going to be fun to work with). Next I sanded, sanded, sanded, and then used G5 quick epoxy to fill the checks. It dries fast and it is thick enough to stay put and not run out of the checks. That worked great, but required a lot of sanding. After the first two I started hitting it with a squeegee after filling the gaps and that really helped because there was less of a "hump" to sand out.

Once all the checks were filled I sanded, sanded, sanded, almost back down to the wood, and then put another coat of epoxy. This will stay for a week while I am out of town and then I will sand, sand, sand and then it's time for fiberglass fun!!!

Next problem is going to be the warped hatch covers. They are warped just on the ends. I tried baking one in the oven to loosen things up and that actually made it worse. I am going to build a form and pour hot water all over them and load it with sandbags to compress it into the form. The hatch covers had arched braces underneath, but it warped around the lip where the braces didn't extend because that's where it mates to the hatch lip. I'll keep ya posted on the progress.

By the way, those little droplets in the foreground are rain drops. It started to pour just as I went out to take the pic. It will be nice not to have to keep this thing covered up any more.