Hello world.  This winter I'm building the Canadian canoe from the kit, I'm documenting my progress in the hope that it will be helpful or encouraging to others.  This might prove to be "interesting" given my garage is only 5.5m long and the finished canoe is 4.75m, but we'll see.  This has the side-benefit of preventing me from procrastinating as the canoe will take up most of the garage so I can't really work on any other projects once I've gotten started.  My goal is to be on the water when spring comes.

Everything arrived well-packaged and intact.  I was initially feeling very confident as I've done a reasonable bit of woodworking before, but that quickly faded as I unpacked the box of very long, bendy pieces of wood.

Before getting going with the epoxy, I had a couple of side projects to complete.  First, an extra-long workbench for gluing the puzzle joints.  My normal portable workbench is two Stanley junior saw-horses (which have slots for 2x4s), with a piece of sacrificial 18mm shuttering ply screwed to the top.  I extended this to about 4m long with some scrap wood I had lying around.

Next up, a hot-box for storing the epoxy.  I'm not going to be able to keep my detached garage-workshop much warmer than about 10C in winter, so I thought I'd at least keep the epoxy warm.  I made a small box out of spare ply scraps, insulated it with some PIR sheets and foil insulation, and added 2x 14W PTC reptile heating pads and an STC-1000 thermostat.  I also added a zigbee temperature sensor, partly out of curiosity and partly because I don't really trust the thermostat.  So far it seems to be working great!

Hopefully back later this weekend once I get the puzzle joints glued up.