Setting up shop

There are many resources better than this blog that detail the building of a Pygmy Coho so I have decided to just focus on giving tips and lessons that I have learned or have been passed on to me by my friend Doug, who is building a Pygmy Arctic Tern. One of the best resources I have found constructing a Coho is a book called "Kayaks You Can Build: An Illustrated Guide To Plywood Construction" by Ted Moores and Greg Rössel. This book documents all the steps involved in constructing a Coho (and two other kayak kits) and includes pages and pages of tips and techniques that will save you time and aggravation if you are building any plywood kayak. I highly recommend this book because there are lots of steps in the instruction manual from Pygmy that are rather vauge and can leave you scratching your head. This book also included loads of photos for all the steps, something that is severely lacking in the manual. I was lucky enough to find this book at my local library, but I will probably buy this book because this will not be the last kayak I build and this is such a great resource!

Before I could start building my Coho I needed to get my shop set up. My first order of business was to build myself a table long enough to allow me to join the panels together. There are many techniques and materials you can use to make a table for this purpose, but I chose to use stuff I had lying around to cut down on costs (always remember, I am cheap!). I found that the sides of a cheap melamine (the white plastic-coated crap you get at Ikea) wardrobe make great panels for the table top. In my opinion melamine panels are an ideal material for a table top because it is cheap, tough and has a nice flat surface that epoxy does not stick to very well. This last property will save you lost of aggravation later if you are unlucky enough to forget to put plastic under your work, or if the epoxy finds it's way around the plactic you have laid down. I put the two sides end to end I had a table that was 0.6 x 4.2 m (2 x 14 ft). This is not ideal since the kayak panels are up to 5.25 m (17.5 ft) long, but I will make it work. For table legs, I chose to use folding work benches. Not only do they make a nice solid base to work on, but I had 6 of these things taking up shop space so this also got them out of my way. You can see glimses of my table in the photos for my first post.