It's a canoe!

Tonight we finished stitching the rest of the panels, this time only stitching every 6 inches - less at the ends.









With all the wires twisted tight, and the center station mould stitched tight to the floor and the top panel, the whole structure became stiff. Next step is taping the internal seams.

A stitch in time

This week we started stitching the panels together. A 1.5mm bit was used to drill holes along both sides the floor panels, roughly 5mm from the edge and about 3 inches apart. Once the second panel (lower bilge) was offered up to the floor and shaped as appropriate, we started stitching, twisting the wire just loosely at first.

Once both sides were stitched in and pulled tightish, we added the center station mould and stitched that into the floor panel. This gave us the rough shape. Clamps at the 'bow' and 'stern' also helped to hold the basic shape.

A sticky situation

This evening we finished off the floor panels and were happy that they all at least looked the same shape. Of course the thickened epoxy resin and glass tape will hide a lot of inexperience. Hopefully.

The panels were laid out on the floor with the butt joins along a piece of scrap ply, with a plastic sheet in between to prevent any embarassing hull additions.

More scrap plywood lengths were placed underneath horizontally to try and keep the panels level at the joins.

At each butt joint, we used a length of 75mm wide plywood (again 6mm gauge) with bevelled edges. Thickened epoxy coated the underside of each one, with anything we could find to weight the joint down (we didn't want to use brass panel pins unless absolutely necessary).