3-D Day!

It’s a strange moment when you get to the “stitch” part of the stitch and glue process. The next step in the process is to drill a bunch of holes in the bottom of the boat… wait, what!?!? Holes in boats are bad, right? Well, there ya go, it has to be done.







So you may ask, “what is the most helpful thing to have on hand when you take a boat 3-D?” Answer: Lots of great friends who are willing to sacrifice their weekends to labor in 100 degree heat for you.


With all this help, the boat goes from being a stack of panels like this,


to something like and actual boat like this in about five minutes.



Then it’s time to start tightening all the wire stitching. The wire is 16 gauge steel wire cut into 3-5 inch lengths. As you might imagine, tightening all those stitches with a regular pair of pliers gets a bit rough on the hands. After several hours of this I decided to invest in a nice pair of vice-grip pliers with padded handles. They make a world of difference.




It’s helpful at this point to have a building cradle to support the hull with enough height that you can fit underneath to tighten the stitches along the centerline.



This is also the time to wire in some of the bulkheads and a temporary center frame to help pull the panels into the correct shape.



The forward bulkhead was a bit stubborn, and after several attempts to pull the hull into the correct shape by tightening stitches, and adding some weight inside the hull to coax some bend into the panels, we decided the leave it alone overnight to see if the plywood would “relax” into the correct shape over time.





When this turned out to not make a difference, I made a call to Graham, the designer (one of the reasons I chose his design was his reputation for always being available to answer questions) and he told me that each variety of plywood has slightly different bending characteristics. That being the case, the best solution was to scribe the existing bulkhead to the actual shape the panels were making rather than try to force them into a shape they were trying to resist. We are not talking about a huge difference here, but my boat will have the sharp bow shape extend several inches further back than the stock plans indicate. I don’t expect this to have a significant impact of the hull’s performance (fingers crossed).

By this time, it was HOT. The more sensible of us decided to find some shade…



But the rest of us kept pressing on tightening stitches and drilling holes into our clothing.



Since the hull shape was now not matching up with the original bulkhead shape, we decided to shave down the building cradle to better match the actual shape.



Some of the stitches were difficult to get at, and it was helpful to have one person press the panels together while the other takes up the slack in the stitches. In tight place like under the hull, this was a job for people who like working closely with others. “Honey, come here, I have a job for you…”



How many guys can say they have a wife who will bleed for their boat project? I’m one lucky dude.


(Thanks to Tracey for taking over camera duties while Marie was under the boat)

So we ended up the day continuing to tighten stitches and watching the hull slowly tighten up. Pretty cool process. I kinda wish I had a stationary camera take time-lapse shots to show the whole process flip-book style. Next time I guess.







It was a long day and I have been allowing my knees a day or two to heal up before I start climbing around under the boat again. It's also (hopefully) going to cool off a bit by this weekend. That will be a nice change to the scorcher we had this week. Thanks again to Guy, Tracey, Tim, Mary, Tom, Nina, Scott and Marie. Without you guys, I would still just have a stack of lumber.

Y'all are the best.