epoxy is AWESOME. It makes boat building easy. If your peices of wood arn't quite the right size and theres a gap, it doesn't matter. you can thicken the epoxy and fill the gap. you can make the outside of something really durable by reinforcing it with fiberglass, or use it as a glue, by mixing in a power to thicken it. you can buy special powders to do this, but I just use flour. you can thin it down so it soaks into wood, sealing it and protecting it from water - and hardening the surface. you can buy special mixes of epoxy which are thinner and specially designed to seal wood, but I just mix in some acetone to normal epoxy.

epoxy has two problems though. the first is that ultra violet sunlight breaks it down and it becomes brittle, so you have to paint it. The second problem if that prolonged exposure to it can cause you to build up an allergy to it. once you have built one boat, you will probably want to build another bigger/faster/better one. It's important to wear gloves and not get it on your skin. it takes a long time to build up the allergy, but if your careless it will happen much faster. I met a sailor once who had the allergy, he had conducted some major repairs to his sailboat with out wearing gloves - and he would use his hands to smooth out and shape the glue. He just didn't know about the danger, and kept on going because he had to fix his boat.

 epoxy comes in two parts, a resin and a hardener, and is mixed together in a simple ratio commonly 4:1. but brands and formulations differ. It is much easier if you have pump despensers.

I used my japanese pull saw to cut the plywood out. It has very sharp teeth which cut on the pull stroke, which means the blade can be thinner because the tension in the blade holds it straight. It also means you can cut slight curves easily and steer the cut. It's more accurate than using a jig saw... and the teeth are so sharp it doesn't take so long anyway.

the first thing to glue are the stringers. my stringers are 19*20 mm strips of cedar the length of the boat. by stringers where actually 5 cm too short, so I extended them with blocks of 18mm ply and the end. I didn't bother to scarf them, because I will be gluing a deck onto the stringer as well, and that will give plenty of strength. if the join was in the middle I would have scarfed it though...

I glued two stringers along the gunwhale. the gunwhale has a curve in it so that the bow is higher than the stern. this is both the save material and for aesthetics. before the stringers are marked down and the gunwhale is just a few pencil marks, once the stringers are glued on the excess can be cut off.

then fiberglass the inside seam where the two plywood sheets join. you have to do this when the wood is flat. To make sure that the pannels meet each other properly, I have held the area down with a large weight. the weight is my epoxy resin. I brought more epoxy than I would need because it's cheaper per litre the more you get. Also, if you just buy what you think you need you will pay more per litre, and if it turns out you've underestimated then you will have to buy more. if you still buy just what you think you will need there is a good chance you'll underestimate it again. my plan is to get plenty, and then maybe sell the remainder or maybe just build another boat!

next, bend the boat into a U shape and fit it into the jigs.

then, I pulled all the edges together and taped them with duct tape. it suddenly looked like a boat!

[photo of taped boat. sorry, image it sitting in my laptop on the wrong end of the island. check back here in two weeks...]

It helps to round the inside of the edges with sand paper, because the edges and nestle next to each other properly. with hard edges one edge will want to sit on top of the other and the boat will come out not quite right. you need something to hold the panels in place while the glue dries. At first I thought that the duct tape would be sufficent but this turned out to be wrong. I ended up drilling holes along the edges and using cable ties. when I started gluing the inside I realised you should use the cable ties with the fastening on the outside. Otherwise you will have to make unsightly bumps to get over them if they are inside.

this is also a good time to install the bulkheads.

 when the glue is hard you turn the boat over, cut away the cable ties, plane or sand down the edges so that they are nicely rounded, and then fiberglass the outside.