Chesapeake 17 Kayak - Stitching The Hull Together (continued) - February 7, 2015

Today the first thing I tried to do was correct the way the side and bottom panels met at the bow. I untwised the wires and put in a wooden dowel to use to align the panels at the bow.

This looks much better and more acceptable to me then what I started with.

Hull all wired up from the bow.

And from the stern.

There were some tricky spots to add the stitches in the stern because the space is very tight, these photos illustrate this.

Above is an inside view of the boat near the stern. The wire near the fiberglass butt joint was actually inserted in a hook or "U" shape  from the bottom panel and then I tried to coax the end into the hole in the side panel. Below is the view from the outside. I used my pliers to carefully pull the wire through some more.

The hull is all wired but before I move on to the next steps of fitting the bulk heads and fairing the hull I need to fabricate the deck beam.

The plan indicates one way to build the deck beam by laminating some strips together on a jig you make with a 15 inch radius. I might try this next time but I had experience with a kit in the past where I just glued two pieces together that where cut in the shape of the deck beam. I thought I would do it this way.

On some scrap 6 mm okoume I drew and cut out may arcs that had an inside arc with a 15 inch radius and outside arc of 16 inch radius. Here's a picture.

 

I used copper wires to get the 15 and 16 inch radius. Then I cut out all the pieces and dry fitted them together. Next I mixed up some epoxy with cell-o-fill to a mustard like consistency and glued the deck beam together.

There are 18 spring clamps holding that mess together. I could just get them open enough to fit around the "deck beam". The epoxy needs to cure for at least 24 hours so that was all for this day.