JEM Watercraft

The cold winter kept me inside these past few months and I got a touch of cabin fever. Several weeks ago, I downloaded the free plans and started building my first stitch and glue project. It is going well, but the learning curve on handling the epoxy "dookie" has been slow. Tomorrow, I will try the restaurant "catsup" squeeze bottle for the first time on the deck. I think this will fix a lot of my problems.
I have a observation and a question. Today when I re-installed the bulkheads into the hull, they were all too small. It seems that I built my hull about 5/8" larger than when I originally tie-rapped everything together. I filled it all up with "dookie" and glassed them in today, but I was wondering what happened.
Now the question. I weight 210 lbs. and have never been in a kayak before. The specs. show the hull is good for 250 lbs., but some comments in this forum mention that persons over 200 should look at a larger boat.
I have plans coming for the Laker 14. Will the laker 13 be too difficult for my learning curve? Should I build the bigger boat before I take to the cold water?
Thanks
Dan

Keep your seat as low as possible, I weigh 210 also and have paddled a lot of miles in my laker.
Ron

Thanks Ron. I plan on sitting on the deck for now. When the water is warmer, i will try other seating options.
Dan

DCRICE wrote: I plan on sitting on the deck for now.

If you mean that you will be sitting on the bottom of the boat inside the cockpit without a seat that will be OK.

However if you mean sitting on the deck behind the cockpit with your feet inside it then you will be going for a swim (unless you have the balance of an olympic gymnast)

No, I meant that I would be sitting down in the boat. The top side of the hull ply.

One more question. After filling the sheer clamp channel with Epoxy, is it necessary to tape this joint. It seems that this would be a good idea, but it is not called for in the free plans.
Thanks
Dan

not required but you can if you want.

I am sure glad it is spring! Have a great time building the boats. So far I have built the free Laker 13, a Greenland paddle, and am about 1 week away from completing the Laker 14 with the plans from Matt. I have pollen from every tree in the neighborhood and all the flying insects native to Louisiana embedded in the epoxy. But that is spring in Louisiana. Thanks for all the builders tips posted on this forum. I was prepared for most of the problems that I have encountered along the way.

I tried to post photos, but received this error: "It was not possible to determine the dimensions of the image."

Can you paste the link the picture(s)?

I'll see what I can do.

Thanks, I tried Facebook, google , and photobucket.
Here is the photobucket links.

http://s1145.photobucket.com/user/Danie ... ort=3&o=12

http://s1145.photobucket.com/user/Danie ... sort=3&o=0

http://s1145.photobucket.com/user/Danie ... sort=3&o=5