Hey everyone! Xyla here, welcome back to my
channel, and today's video is gonna be a very interesting experiment because I have absolutely
no idea what I'm doing, I don't know if it's gonna work, it's like $500 worth of materials and we're
just going for it! Because if i learned anything in engineering school it's.... actually....
did I learn anything in engineering school? Okay! So while I was building the canoe i asked
my uncle if it would be possible to skip the wooden part of the canoe and just go straight
for clear fiberglass and get a clear canoe. No one seems to have an answer so...
let's try it? Oh! Before we try it, hit the subscribe button- and if you're
feeling really ambitious you can also hit the like button, but I haven't proven
to you that i deserve your like yet, so maybe hit the like button at the end. But hit
the subscribe button now! All right let's do it. Oh, this is the wrong way up. Also I feel the need to point out that I
had a little hair dye incident as you may be able to tell, and my hair will hopefully be
getting fixed halfway through this video. So if my hair suddenly changes color that's why. To
prep the kayak for the layup I first sanded out as best i could a lot of the scratches on the hull,
and then removed any screws and began to wax using a mold release wax. And this waxing process is
pretty much the same as polishing wax for a car or an airplane if you're familiar with that. You just
wax on with circles and then wipe off the excess. Also as an aside this is one of my best friends
from college; his name is Umit and he's gonna be helping a ton in this video so get used to seeing
his fabulous mug! Just kidding-- actually he needs a visa... so if there's any single interested
u.s citizens please submit your resumes in the comments. Thank you. Oh my god he's going to kill
me... Next up is to go in with this PVA film which is polyvinyl alcohol and it's a biodegradable
water-soluble mold release film so it forms a protective physical barrier between the epoxy and
the boat and then once we break it off we can just wash it all off with water outside. Woohoo! It's
the part you've been waiting for- it's time to start fiberglassing and i know everyone loved the
fiberglassing on my canoe because it was fun and it was exciting and the canoe was wood and it was
pretty. Um... but this time all we're going to be doing is fiberglassing and you're gonna see the
exact same thing eight times. And i've said it before and i'm gonna say it again but the key to
getting a good layup with fiberglass is to smooth it out while it's still dry like get all those
wrinkles out before you mix the epoxy and you will be a much happier camper. There's no going back!
And i'll be the first one to admit that it is more satisfying to see fiberglass go onto a beautiful
cedar boat you've just slaved over but it's still satisfying to see it just turn blue... i'm just
saying! And just FYI this is TotalBoat's 2:1 epoxy with slow hardener, which i think is the best for
fiberglassing... going on over 4oz fiberglass. and because this fiberglass that i'm using is a
bi-directional weave which is the most classic of weaves so you have two directions of glass
fibers going in 90 degrees from each other kind of like a cotton t-shirt. I'm gonna go on with
the next layer at an angle and the idea behind this is that over the course of the four layers
we'll get the most omnidirectional weave possible and that also turns into kind of a fun angle
tetris game of trying to figure out what angles of cuts will maximize your fiberglass use. So
for the seam here i think the move is going to be to pour here first and wet that out and that will
sort of turn it into one piece of fiberglass... at least that's what i'm telling myself
to make it easier to sleep at night the bow and stern are a little bit of a
game of like... gift wrap origami packing christmas present thing um but if you're careful
and you just make sure that there's no folds it goes pretty smoothly and then it's literally rinse
and repeat except this time you'll notice that our fiberglass angle is going the other way. again,
just going for as omnidirectional as possible. and while we speed through this layer
it's probably a good time to tell you that all of these layers of fiberglass need to
chemically bond to each other which means that each one has to go on while the previous
layer is still green or still slightly tacky so it needs to be cured enough that the previous
layer isn't going to stick while we're smoothing out the fiberglass but it also cannot be fully
cured or the layers won't bond together. and since it takes four to five hours for each layer to go
green if you did some quick math that means you'll know we started at like seven in the morning and
went until one or two in the morning the next day and then despite the very late night the
previous night this flood coat layer is still needed to chemically bond to all the
layers of fiberglass which means that yes it was back in the workshop at like seven in the
morning the next day to fill in the weave and i need to fill in the weave because i need to make
it sandable and i don't want to have to sand down to the fiberglass i want to only be sanding epoxy
that'll help preserve some of the clarity of the overall structure because once you sand fiberglass
it gets less clear Oh my gosh! My hair color changed! Amazing. Anyway, today is de-molding
day and i feel like now is the right time to say i know this is not the best way to make
a clear boat like i already thought about all of the things you're probably gonna mansplain
to me in the comments so please just don't. i'm not doing this project to get a clear boat,
although it would be really cool if i end up with a clear boat. I'm doing this project to answer the
*question* that i had which is: is it possible to lay up a bunch of layers of fiberglass and get a
clear structure? a clear composite. and that's why i'm doing this. i say that before we de-mold
and then my hypothesis is that it's gonna be frosted it's definitely not gonna be crystal clear
there's like no way to get all the air bubbles out of epoxy like this but hopefully it'll be pretty
clear that's kind of the best i can hope for and now for some pretty decently satisfying
demolding footage. it's a super big bummer that the lights in this warehouse i'm
building this in are so loud because otherwise i might be able to tag this as
asmr... i don't know... what do you think? okay so my stir stick method here worked
super well and i think that all i have to do is do this exact same thing on the
other side and then grab a friend and we can lift it off i hope. i'm crossing
my fingers but you can't really tell oOOoOOoooh! like it's definitely moving oOooooooh! oh my god! then just a quick trim of all of the
fiberglass excess with an oscillating saw even the scratches on the
bottom transferred! yeah. then i cleaned and lightly sanded the interior
so that i could do some flood coats because the epoxy wasn't green anymore i did have to sand it
to rough it up which kind of sucks but we made it and seeing this coat on it definitely gave
me an appreciation for how clear it actually came out because like yes it's still frosted
but look at that that's pretty cool it looks like ice! it'd be cool if they made like an
electric version of a screwdriver you know where like you pulled a trigger and it would
automatically... that would be pretty nice yeah and with that put aside it was time to move
on to the decks. And this process is pretty much a rinse and repeat of the bottom so
i'm just gonna put on some cool music and yes, alright! Get'em! TotalXyla for 15% off! and just like that we're
on to the flood coats. man, building stuff is much easier in hyperlapse mode! and then... brace yourself... the
dreaded sanding. and i kid you not it's been three months and i still have
a back injury from doing this. like, i don't think there's anything worse than
sanding the inside of a boat. i just... i.. i... i got nothing. all i can say is you
guys are damn lucky you get to just watch me do this in like hyper hyper hyperlapse
because look how much effort it takes to get that stupid orange peel texture off! ah! i have
like ptsd just watching this footage back and with both halves sanded it was time to
go outside and give them a bath. which was nice! it was like an excuse to see the
sun for the first time in several days i'm soggy. i'm very very
soggy and it is very cold. And then since the kayak wasn't crystal clear
anyway i thought it would be super fun to install a bunch of individually addressable leds and turn
it into a party kayak. drop a comment if you want a more technical video later on but as far as a
non-technical explanation goes here's the simplest i can do. these are individually addressable LEDs
that i'm running off of an arduino, and my goal is to wire this in a way that makes it simple to map
it in software so i can easily animate patterns onto it. so i ran a complete strip down each side
pointing inwards for that beautiful glow, plus one around the coaming, and then three disjointed
bow-to-stern strips down the decking. And i just soldered hookup wire in between the segments
of leds so the software would see it all as one continuous strand that could run off one pin, and
then just told the code how many leds were in each segment. So each of those strips gets its own pin.
And now, i have to warn you at this point we are four days away from this kayak needing to go into
a u-haul and me moving across the country which means... yeah we're we're rushing a little bit
here. and a quick tip from someone who soldered a lot of these led strips the easiest way to do this
is to put a bunch of solder on the pads as well as tin the wires and then you won't need to add
solder as you're kind of finessing the wires into those teeny spots you can just heat it up
with a soldering iron and they'll solder together and then because you should never rely on a
solder joint as a structural joint i went in and just covered all of my new joints with a big
blob of hot glue and that's super helpful as well because i had to strip off some of that silicone
weatherproofing and that re-waterproofs it and then once the wiring harnesses were
tested and complete it was time to just epoxy them down which is incredibly nerve-wracking
because there's like literally no going back and then with the lights tested and secured
down it was time to make and install the coaming. and for this i'm using a one inch
vinyl tube because i'm creative as heck... no it just made a lot of sense. this whole
process was actually incredibly difficult and i tried this myself twice before like
bribing umit to come back and help me and together plus a heat gun we got it in shape but
it was still i mean a lot of clamps as you can see and then to get the vinyl tubing to stay in
place i used a lot of CA glue and a lot of CA glue accelerator. so i basically just glued
down a little section zapped it, and then waited for it to harden and moved on to the next
section. i did that to both the top and the bottom with the coaming ca glued on it was time to
actually adhere it like well to the kayak so i pulled out some scrap fiberglass from making the
kayak and cut a strip that would go all the way around the vinyl tube and wrap around; holding
it on and adding a lot of structural support and i gotta tell you this was likely the hardest
fiberglassing i think i've ever done. i wound up with a lot of epoxy in my hair... and to give
you some perspective you are currently watching this on 200x speed. it was doing the bottom
at the same time that made it so difficult because you needed to wait long enough
for the epoxy to start getting tacky in order for it to stick to the bottom and once
the epoxy is set for a couple hours and is green you know how it is satisfying cut a satisfying cut and then the last thing to do before
attaching the deck and the hull together was to varnish the inside because it's a lot
easier to furnish the inside when you can reach it uh then after it's put together... you know.
and i am using halcyon in clear by TotalBoat which is the only marine varnish i know of that is
genuinely clear and not tinted some sort of amber and then once the varnish was dry we peeled off
the masking tape which was giving an area that the fiberglass tape we're going to use
to stick the two halves together uh like a rough surface that's unvarnished
for it to adhere to. so we peeled off the masking tape and then we stuck down all the
lights and then it was ready to assemble! this is Xyla from the future and i'm telling
you to tell me next time i say i'm gonna build a boat say no that's a terrible idea because
this boat has to go in a u-haul tomorrow because tomorrow i'm moving to california and it's
still in two pieces. i'm really scrambling to get this into a position where it can get shoved into
a truck. *six months later you build another boat* are you doing this? we're doing this. okay. i don't think i've changed my clothes in
like three days. well they'll think it's one continuous filming awesome it roughly looks
like a boat. look at those boat-like features! so we super securely masking taped the top
and the bottom together and then i turned to umit for knowledge because at this point i was
really tired and i had no idea what i was doing. "the way i watched this on youtube get
done..." okay, so maybe we were sort of in the same *boat* but at least Umit actually did
his research! uh so the technique we used is we took this strip of fiberglass tape and wetted it
out and then rolled it up into this neat little jelly roll and once it was nice and tidy moved
over into the kayak and then slowly unrolled it over the seam of where the two halves meet pushing
down around the led strip and smoothing it out and this is why not varnishing that area was so
important is so that this tape can adhere to it and then it was just a rinse and repeat on the
other side and by the way i highly recommend hiring a friend with really long arms for
this part because it comes in handy! and once those were cured overnight i peeled off the
masking tape and sanded the two halves flush and then to seal the outer seams i used
the exact same fiberglass tape method and at some point i decided that the maiden
voyage had to be in the cuyahoga river in cleveland as sort of a tribute to cleveland being
my home for the last six years and also just so that all of the people who helped me on this
project could actually see it float which means that you are watching the first coat of exterior
varnish go on one hour before everyone arrives to see this launch. Now before we hit the
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*falls onto dock* made it fam!
