PedalTheOcean.com

We made some decent progress on the test boat yesterday. Ben "BEAN" Eadie came over and built a hot wire cutter for the foam sections, and my Friend Matt "CLAMP" Hoffman contributed his expert filming talents.

I have not mentioned this yet, but I invested in a High Def video camera with the objective of filming this entire project which might find it's way into a documentary, TV series or film some day.

Matt "clamp" Hoffman is on board as our official expedition videographer.

We're all professionals here - so don't try this at home. Clamps history in the film industry is long and accomplished going back as far as a couple of days ago when he browsed through the Sony HDR-FX1 manual and learned where the record button was. And of course, you know some of my extensive maritime background which consists of driving over bridges crossing the mighty Bow river here in Calgary - at least twice per day - sometimes more!

Assembling the styrofoam sections:

I sliced up my computer model into 29 sections then printed each sections outline onto tiled letter-sized sheets of paper which I taped together.

For the main profile I had to tile together 88 sheets of paper and then cut around the perimeter.

The main profile section was traced onto multiple sheets of 2" thick pink Styrofoam, cut out and assembled into the Hyak kayak hull. After the main profile was secured into the middle of the kayak, I sanded down the edge with a wire brush to get the line smooth. The 29 perpendicular sections will be cut out of 1" thick Styrofoam and hot glued to both the main profile and the sides of the kayak.

To facilitate the Styrofoam cutting, Ben whipped up this nifty hot wire cutter which works pretty slick.

This week, I'll be in the shop alone and I will start gluing the sections into place. Hopefully, we can start fiberglass on the weekend or early next week.