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Bulkheads, Hatches, and Custom Wood Kayak Hand Toggles!

Busy day so far! Continuing on some of the detail stuff on my Pygmy Borealis XL kayak.

I received my new batch of epoxy and was able to do some fiberglassing jobs this morning. First I filled the backside of the bulkhead holes that I drilled through the bulkheads with epoxy, and then fiberglassed the bulkheads. The 3.5" stock that will become the hip braces was fiberglassed too. See picture below.


Then I sanded and fiberglassed the insides of the hatches that I cut out last week.

Pygmy Kayak hatches

All of those fiberglassed pieces will be trimmed once they reach the "green stage" in a few hours.

Then I started in on making my custom kayak hand toggles. One of my many hobbies is woodworking and I'm fortunate enough to have many woodworking tools; table saw, band saw, stationary sander, etc... Because I have access to the tools I can make my own custom hand toggles, but if you don't have access you may decide to simply purchase the plastic ones that Pygmy or other suppliers sell. They work perfectly!

I started by running up to Rockler Woodworking in Seattle and dove through their scrap bin. They had several nice slices of hardwood in varying colors, so I bought several. $4.99/lbs. and it all came to about $15 with most of it left over after I trimmed out what I needed. So I'm already no more expensive than the plastic ones.


Then I trimmed them to rough size and laid them out in the order I wanted them.


Next I brushed on some slightly thickened epoxy on each side that would touch and clamped them all together.


Will wait 24 hours and then cut out the blanks and drill holes through them and then shape them on the stationary sander. Hopefully they'll look great!

UPDATE: I completely forgot to add some pics of the finished toggles, so here they are now. NOTE: They would have a few coats of teak oil on them after these pictures. You would not epoxy them due to the larger amount of solid wood... they would expand and crack possibly. 





Aloha!



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  1. Unknown27 September, 2019 18:47

    i'd love to see a finished picture of the toggles. is there one?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Steve15 October, 2019 19:22

    Thanks for your post! I just now added some pictures of the finished toggles. You would of course also want to coat them in teak oil or even mineral oil.

    ReplyDelete

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