Day 20 & 21 It's all a matter of re-cycling

Tea Count 4
Injuries 0
Time Spent 10 Hours
Stickiness Factor 5/10

Good evening, morning or afternoon readers. (delete as appropriate) Let's get the apologies out of the way first. You will no doubt have noticed that I have not been blogging for nearly a month now and if truth be told, which it will be, progress has been slow. I am sorry for the lack of updates but not for the well needed time out.

Following my last post I had a nasty reaction to either the poxy resin, the fibre glass dust or both. The upshot of this was a pair of swollen, puffy eyes, rashes on my leg tummy arms and neck and very very itchy eyelids – not the best symptoms to have if you're a photographer! Needless to say some time off from sanding and poxying was ordered and I dutifully obeyed. Much of my time away from canoe building was spent walking. First, a good 15km hike around the Lambourne gallops in the company of air cadets. This only served to Then a weekend of camping and walking in North Wales again in the company of cadets.

In between this of course was the scheduled launch date of our lovely canoe. In hindsight this was always a little optimistic. On the bright side though, we still had the launch/birthday party on the 17th March. On the dark side, the 18th March was very much a sofa day nursing a head partially, but thankfully temporarily damaged by blackberry vodka - a concoction of my lovely wife's making. It is both delicious and addictive but ever so slightly dangerous. It renders limbs quite useless in less time than I remember!

So..to matters of canoe! Now that my rashes have almost all cleared up and he eyelids have returned to their pre-itchy state, I deemed it safe to continue. My first task of the day was to finish making the bilge runners of the aft section and using the left over cut-offs I recycled them into the rails for the aft seat. Shaping the ends to fit into the curved section of the boat was an arse of a job but satisfying when completed. Using the cut-offs from these rails I recycled them to make the kneels for the seat rails to sit on which I then shaped to mirror the curves of the hull. Yep, that was also an arse of a job.

I also laid another coat of resin on the forward section both inside and out. I'm using a roller to put the resin on now as it is much easier and gives a better finish. It lays on a thinner coat and still runs and sags a little but the finish is better and weave of the glass cloth is now almost filled.

The finish on the decorative decking is now very pleasing and another coat should see it finished. In fact I'm hoping, nay pleading and hoping that one more coat of resin all over will see this half finished and with thought spurring me on I decided to embark on the all important job of installing the beverage holder tops.

As you can see from the photograph it's a welcome addition to the build. I'm making the actual beverage holders using left over fibreglass cloth, utilising some cardboard tubing as a mould. Will it work? Dunno, we'll have to wait and see but I do have a plan B if this fails.

I'm hoping with next weekend being a long one I may get very close to finishing the whole project. My next goal is to have it ready for a canoe camping trip on 20th April. Fingers crossed but no promises!!!