Today I just spent my time stitching panels together and tuning the fit of the panels against each other. I had her pretty close then decided to back off the bow a bit and adjust a few things…
It’s very close now, though, very close.
This is nice, you can get a bit of a sense of the sheer line.
And here you can see the bow, it’s not actually under that much pressure to get it this snug. There’s a little bit of a gap at the chine which I suspect I’ll need to work out by pulling the chines closer to the center line in the forward 18-24 inches, but it’s not severe. Epoxy would fill it without much difficulty.
If you look REALLY closely in a couple of pics you might see some wood fibres poking out right at the zip ties. Those are little bits of those 1/16” or 1/8“ cutoff strips from yesterday, I think. Was it the day before? At any rate I’m using them as spacers to keep the panels a bit separate for gluing. My tendency is probably to build tighter than I should; a bigger gap might be better. That’s the kind of thing I tend to struggle with in stitch and glue.
On a positive note, since the hull is stitched, and the process is called stitch and glue, all that’s left must be the gluing. I’m half done! I guess I’ll be finished in three weeks!
Or, you know, maybe not.