Lots of small things fixed today.
Started of with fabricating the mounting brackets for the beachwheel crossbar.
The brackets will be bolted down in the rails with four 5mm bolts in the T-nuts. I wanted 6mm bolts but I could not find any stainless 6mm T-nuts. I have designed the brackets so I can upgrade to 6mm later on if I need to.
I welded a 8mm nut on each side. Drilled and filed out the underside of the motorcrossbar to fit over the bolts and the welded nut. Now I can easily bolt down the motorcrossbar to the wheelbrackets. Makes it pretty easy to remove when I want to.
A buddy of mine will do the welds but I can tack it together in the mean time.
Before I can weld the wheel crossbar I had to do the final mount of the rails that will hold them.
Not a very plesant job trying to reach deep inside the kayak with Sikaflex gunk everywhere withot beeing able to see what you are doing.
I polished up the inner mouting bars, prepared and put everything in order before I began.
I taped up /masked the kayak and rails not to mess them up from the Sikaflex. (The stuff is hard to remove)
I applied a rather a thick layer of sikaflex under the rails and also inside on the mounting bars.
The first side went well but the right side gave me a lot of greef. I had a hard time getting the first bolts into the nuts. More and more black gunk spreading all over my hands and inside the kayak.
After a lot of profound language
I finaly could take a breather and with my arms aching admire the result.
My arms are just to short! Without the welded nuts I could never have managed to do this.
Inside the kayak there was some gunk that I had to cleen up the best I could, well nobody will see it inside the kayak anyway
The bolts are yet not fully tightened. Tomorrow when the Sikaflex is harder I will tighten them fully. (It usually takes 1-2 days for the gunk to fully harden)
I now hope the rails are correctly mounted so this messy job will be worth the trouble.
The Sikaflex will spread the forces more evenly on the HDPE plastic and hopefully prevent any cracks in the kayak. Maybe it will also reduce some of the vibrations from the motor.
Tomorrow I will continue finishing the motormount and work on the beachwheel. Its all slowly progressing in the right direction, nice!
I hope I might take a first testride this weekend to try out the 5hp Mercury.