President John F. Kennedy made a speech in Houston, Texas, at Rice University on September 12, 1962. I was only nine years old at the time, but one part of that speech eventually reached me and stayed with me, as it has for most Americans:“We choose to go to the Moon…We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”The president’s declaration led to Neil Armstrong, less than seven years later, making the first footprint on the lunar surface. And getting to that point was hard, even for a nation with almost unlimited resources. As individuals, we set goals for ourselves that are more modest than going to the moon, but those that are the hardest for us to achieve, no less “measure the best of our energies and skills."
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By the way, the axis of the rudder seems very well known to me. It looks like the output shaft of a head-lamp wiper motor. In the eighties I developed this little motor for nearly every existing car. While testing, we did a lot of misuse. They survived, for example, three times the lifetime cycle completely under water. So we did the best, so you could use the shaft at your boat 🙂
Best wishes from Germany
The repairs turned out great.
Whenever I “complain” to Pat, about a problem I have encountered in a project, she says, “remember, it’s part of the process.”
Exactly!!!
Nicely done !
Great story. If it was easy, anybody could do it…
I built my boat in a 12′-wide boat shed with exposed studs in walls (boat is 8′ wide). To achieve some of the plywood bends,I utilized the upright studs with other lumber wedged in. Some bends in the bow were pretty tight and unclampable. Your repair looks great.
Just wonderful – and you’ll love the boat all the more!
This reminds of an oft-quoted comment by Nick Schade who – toward the end of his book, The Strip-Built Sea Kayak, points out the the boat is not complete until it sustained its first gouge (painful but inevitable). I’m not sure Nick had this kind of gouge in mind, but based on this attitude, you now have an immensely perfect and complete boat, and a stunning beauty at that!
Couldn’t agree more with all of the above comments, and I also know from personal experience dropping my Sam Devlin Duckling 14 off the roof of the car while trying to load it on a slope that, after the repairs, the bond between boat and owner is stronger than ever, just like the repair. Congratulations.
Wayne from Australia
I have a Wilderness Systems Arctic Hawk fiberglass Greenland-style kayak that I thought I’d spread out the cross bars on my roof carrier before heading to the cape. People told me to be wary of traffic on the Bourne Bridge. Not having much success budging them, I started out. he nagging tap tap sound I heard about 1 hour down the highway I attributed to my straps flapping, a common occurrence. It got louder and I glanced the rear view mirror in time to watch the whole kayak AND the cross bars (I kid you not) go flying into the breakdown lane of I-295 in Maine. Apparently I had budged them more than I thought. Luckily there were no cars immediately behind. An off-duty state trooper stopped and helped me load it in the back of my Volvo and I limped home.
I thought it was toast but the more I looked at the cracked nose and couple of scrapes, I realized I could epoxy that back together which is just what I did. It’s not the prettiest job but allowed me to get it on the water again. Others expected me to make a planter out of it, which I wasn’t having
Also I get bragging rights to the day my Arctic Hawk took a flying leap.
When I was putting wood together to make something called a sharpie and hoping that it would float at some time in the future, I performed what I called my “ok, give it your best shot, have a beer and remember it is wood and can be cut away” dance just before attempting a difficult part of the build. From numerous dances, experience showed: Do not use cheep beer. Only the best, and sometimes in quantity, creates the best results. Looking at your photos, I estimate you had a case to case and a half job. Well done.