Newbie stitching question

[baydog]

At HD in the flooring dept. they have these little plastic crosses to keep tile at correct gap for uniform grouting. I plan on buying alot of those to space between my stitches and see if that will make for a more uniform shape and gap. Of course I still have to finish my workshop at my "new" old house and then I will start cutting ply for GV 13.

[Lon]

If you had an exact fit set of CAD plans and a CNC router cut set of panels, I think the plywood would bend in such a way that the gap would not be exactly uniform.
Rather than buy a lot of spreaders, I would use a kitchen match or popsicle stick to hold apart the panels where they want to touch (hard spot) and then progressively snug and adjust ties so that the bending flow of the panel is smooth and fair and symmetrical.
If you brute force your panels to exact spreader width everywhere, you will probably have unwanted "waves" in the panels.

[baydog]

Lon that is something to think about, thanks.

[stickystuff]

A little tip from a PH16 and PH15 builder. If you can get under the hull, take some blue masking tape and tape the seams.from the bottom side. Then when you epoxy the seams you wont have any gobs of the stuff dripping all over the place and you don't waste near as much mix. After it kicks you can crawl back under and peel the tape off. Worked great for me. Epoxy is expensive and takes a lot of filler to thicken it up.

[Toni V]

One thing about stitching; The gaps are not supposed to be evenly sized in every place. What is needed is symmetry and even nice curves on plywoods. A 6mm gap is better than no gap and weirdly bent panels.

I personnally checked that both sides look the same. At bow the bottom panels were on top of side panels (or actually the bottom were under the side panels, but the hull was upside down...). About 1 metre from bow the bottom was inside the side panels - thus bottom was below the sides. I think that's okay - both sides were looking similar, I won't care that panels did not meet exactly the same in every place.

[sgorey]

I spent a good deal of time today getting the hull fair.

I started by cutting the ties at chine up to about 4 feet from the bow. I then used a straight board and string to look for flatness and straightness.

I think it's turned out pretty good, but I did end up cutting quite a bit off of the side panels to get it to line up with the bottom. I'll end up needing to add filler to the top of the side panels when it's flipped.

I think my problem was caused by the side panels not being spliced together properly. I just layed them end to end on the floor and applied tape and epoxy. I should have also used a chalk line and placed the panels the correct distance from it based on the plans.

Something like this...(please excuse my mspaint image)



Hopefully I can spot tape tonight so that I can cut the ties, fill the gaps and tape tomorrow.

Steve