Thanks Rehd. Yeah, I know I could make this one work if I reworked that dowel... when I look at the union of those two parts I can see it was bound to fail. I'm puttng the project down because I found out what I wanted to know; now, when the time comes, I can put one together knowing the gotchas in advance... probably this Spring.

Until then I got two little projects named Jake and Charlie that have priority, plus the double kayak that needs to be finished! I put the building sequence for the pump on the Paddles/Kayak Accessories page of my site.