Glueing Seams

Now that the boat is fully stitched, as best as we can do it, we mix up a small batch of epoxy, pour it into a dental syringe, and then lay a thin bead of glue into all the seams we stitched together.

This is the point of no return, meaning that once you glue the panels, the boat shape is set. If you don't have it straight, you're screwed. All the fiddling with the stitches seems to have paid off - the keel seems perfectly straight; the top of the deck seems level; no twist as far as I can tell. Should track straight.

Still, glueing the seams was far harder for us than it should have been. The problem we had was that it was a mess. The glue easily ran out of the seams and down the sides of the boat, and we just weren't practiced with the process. We did a lot of wiping up drips, and going back and refilling in seams that didn't want to fill in. Once this dries, we mix another batch of epoxy that has some wood flour mixed in to thicken it. This is used to make a rounded edge over the seams. Again, very messy, we never really got the hang of this.

Here is confession 1 - all the pictures this far are from the Pygmy building instructions. I didn't think about taking pictures up to this point, but wanted to show what the process looked like. All the pictures after this will be from our own boat. The picture here is what the bead of epoxy along the seams is supposed to look like.