Putting It Together

There really isn't much to say about this without going into a long description of the process. The short version is that you drill pairs of holes along the edges of the panels and "stitch" them together using cable ties. It takes a while to do and, even with the boat raised on trestles, there is a lot of bending and kneeling making it quite hard work. Stitching the panels together took about 4 hours.

At this stage the boat is quite floppy and I spent a bit of time making sure that the hull was fair and not twisted. Where I had cut the bottom panel too narrow at the stern there were gaps either side tapering from about 5 mm to nothing. I cut some scrap timber to suit and slipped it into the gaps.

The next step is to tack the panels together with fillets of thickened epoxy between the cable ties. This took about 2 hours. It's a fiddly job leading to sticky fingers! It saves a lot of time later if this is done as tidily as possible because cleaning off the excess epoxy when it has hardened is not a nice job!

Here are some photos of the boat looking like a boat. You can see cable ties and the epoxy fillets in these photos.