The kayak arrives

I picked up the Tern 14 from UPS today. The pick-up would have gone smooth, but Canada Customs seems to have adopted a new attitude whereby they don’t actually believe the invoices they see for goods imported. They wanted to see an actual credit card receipt to prove that the kayak did cost as much as the invoice claimed. I downloaded the price sheet from Pygmy’s website and gave that to them, and they were happy. Visa had not yet posted the transaction to my account, so I couldn’t download the visa bill to prove how much I paid.

I’ve had a chance to go through the construction manual and things seem relatively straight forward. One thing that struck me is that the manual could use a lot more figures and photos. I’m sure I’ll figure it all out as I go along, but why not add a few more pictures. From what I can tell, the key to building this kayak will be to carefully apply the epoxy in order to minimize sanding. Another challenge will be matching the epoxy (med or fast curing) with the temperature in our garage. As well, I may want to add some heat to the garage to help the application of epoxy. I was originally planning on using some fast cure epoxy for the colder temperatures, but I didn’t consider that although this will be desirable from a curing point of view, the cold temperature will likely make the epoxy more difficult to apply. So in the end it may be preferred to heat the garage and use the medium cure epoxy. The big downside to this is the fact that the garage is not insulated and I’ll be wasting a lot of energy.