A three piece

A few weeks ago I was left with a fibre glass kayak that I had made for a customer,  the GEL coat paint job was a little  challenging to say the least.

It looks simple but you don't see the finished result till you pull the kayak out of the mould
I hadn't lined up the joints perfectly and it wasn't up  to NKA or the customers quality so we were left with a well laid up kayak with only an imperfect gel coat paint job

So what could I do with this kayak...

I chopped it into three pieces

 

I had been researching options of getting the Nadgee brand overseas for awhile now and had some interest from overseas  but the cost of transporting a single piece 5.3mtr kayak around a country from aircraft to aircraft and back again was ridiculous.

The simplest way is too chop your kayak into thirds, (we are looking at a 2 piece at the moment but more of that later) build some extra beefed up bulkheads and fit these in each end 

But its not that simple,we spent a few hours going over correct, how to correctly align,what kind of layup for the bulkheads,how and where to cut and what to use to cut  , making sure we had it all covered, not wasting extra time getting it wrong, as its easy to do.
It was down to a hand held hacksaw for the slowest straightest cut we could do  and to ensure we had a straight line to follow we used a level and a good eye and tripled checked our work

It worked a treat and came out absolutely perfect and we were off to a flying start but that was only the first hurdle