Now comes the hard part - David's Boat Building Workshop

This next step, for me at least, is the most difficult step of building a kayak-attaching the deck to the hull. It requires working with sticky epoxy and uncooperative fiberglass. It requires patience and a steady hand, not the thing to do if you’re in a hurry and all coffee-ed up.

The process is to epoxy the two sections together. You start on the inside of the boat along seam where the two meet. You then epoxy one inside seam, let it cure then epoxy the other inside seam. It really doesn’t take a long time but the set up work does. You have to make sure the edges line up as well and the bow and the stern.

One would think since one built the sections on a form that the pieces would line up and fit together and that would be that. But that’s not always the case. When I fiberglassed the inside of the deck I thought I was careful to maintain the shape of the deck but evidently not careful enough. I had to bend and tape and strap and use all kinds of gentle persuasion to get things alligned right. And of course I did not take very many pictures.

This will take some explaining. I need to reach into the ends of the boat from the cockpit to make sure the fiberglass tape is set correctly along the seam. This 7′ 1×2 has the end angle cut and a chip brush screwed on to it. This will let me extend the brush into the hull and smooth the fiberglass tape against the seams.

This is the fiberglass tape used for the seam. I cut four strips almost 7′ long, two for each side.

A somewhat compressed look at the inside of the boat looking back towards the stern

Looking forward into the bow. You can see the spreader boards I used to open spread the hull a little bit. Those will be removed once the epoxy in cured

Here is the boat all strapped up ready to epoxy together. I think I used a whole roll of strapping tape to hold it together.

I stole this from my Night Heron build book. This illustrates what I did probably far better than my words.

Once the inside cured, I taped the seam on the outside. The masking tape is to limit where I didn’t want the epoxy to go. Once cured The additional coats of epoxy will mostly cover this taped seam. I used strips of 4oz fiberglass here instead of the 9 oz.

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