Das Boot!

Now the canoe takes on the normal 'rockered' shape and all is right with the world!

Off my rocker!

When the bottom panels and the bilge panels were stitched together I was alarmed to find the boat coming together wit a lot of 'reverse rocker' i.e. the bottom of the boat was concave when it should be convex! It wasn't until the side panels were stitched on and the 3 spreader bars put in place did the canoe take on it's familiar boat shape. I breathed a sigh of relief at this point as I had envisaged starting the whole thing from scratch! Oh the value of patience!

A stitch in time.........

Next job was marking out the stitch holes for the copper wire. Tedious job, but quite easy. The copper wire was simply ring main stripped of its plastic coating and snipped into 4 inch lengths.
The holes were drilled with the trusty cordless drill and a 1m.m. bit and the stitching part of 'stitch and glue' came together.

Butt at last!

After a long, cold, East coast winter when the temperature never even approached double figures it became obvious I would be asking for trouble using epoxy resin in such temperatures. It wasn't until April when the temperature rose sufficiently that I got the credit card out of mothballs and bought epoxy, hardener, fibreglass tape and glueing powder (filleting blend, it was advertised as). This little lot was £88 and the biggest cost to date. Raif was badgering me to get the canoe built in time for the coarse fishing season so I bit the bullet and .............
Using cat food tins and marked sticks for measuring along with some gluing powder soon had the butt joints sorted. I did come a cropper with the side panels though as these joints were not taken from the straight edge of the plywood but were marked and cut by me......Big mistake! Very hard to cut a straight edge with a jigsaw and expect it to join up at the correct angle. Next morning I ended up with the two side panels not matching at all! I spent a couple of hours sawing through the epoxy joint of the worst panel (This stuff sure does stick!) I then re glued it up on top of the 'best' panel as a guide with some plastic between so as not to stick the two together. This worked and next morning all the panels matched (Thank God!)