I started working on it this morning, though. The first thing that had to be done was the grinding away of the old epoxy that had apparently been used to aid the rivets in holding the hinge strip to the cowl. This step was quite easy, mostly due to a convenient tool crossover. I used the orbital sander that played such an integral role in the building of the kayak:
I also had to drill out the rivets holding in the remaining piece of yet another broken hinge. It's bad enough that I have no idea how this one got broken, but I also have no idea how it got broken this badly:
On the plus side, it was far easier to drill out the rivets from the inside out than it had been to do it from the outside in like I had to do with the other hinge:
Not that it matters because they're going to get filled with epoxy anyway, but the holes got far less elongated:
In yet another beneficent crossover, leftover materials from the kayak were already on hand for the filling of the old holes with new epoxy:
The pumps on the epoxy containers hadn't been exercised for a couple of years so I had to purge them, clean them, and re-prime them before dosing out a bit of epoxy to suck into a syringe. My first idea was to clamp the new hinge in place and use it to hold the epoxy in the holes:
That didn't work as well as I had hoped it would so I had to remove the hinge and try masking tape instead:
That seemed to work a lot better. Now it all needs to sit overnight curing.
I'll check on it second thing in the morning. What will I do first thing in the morning? Well, more than likely I'll be outside shaking my fist at a tauntingly blue sky.
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