Quote:
Originally Posted by squirell nutkin
Glatt, do you have any pictures of your stitch and glue kayak? Is that like a Baidarka?
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Stitch and glue is a construction technique where you cut up thin plywood (quarter inch) into panels, and then you join them together by drilling little holes, spaced every few inches near the panel edges. You cut up some copper wire into 4 inch lengths. You bring the panels next to one another, and starting at one end, you stitch the panels together by using the wires like twist ties through the holes. As you go along, the boat magically comes into shape. You don't tighten the twist ties too tight at first, so you can adjust things a little and make the curves fair, but once everything in in the right place, you tighten it all up. The boat is pretty stiff and rigid at this point and looks like frankenstein with lots of ugly wire poking out all over the place. You flip it over and use thickened epoxy to caulk along all the seams on the inside. Backed with fiberglass tape. Once the epoxy hardens, you flip it back again, and snip off all the wires, and sand them flush with the hull. Then you glass the hull.
It's a very fast way to build a boat, and probably the second cheapest, after skin on frame, where you stretch fabric over a frame.
I built my kayak in about 40 hours, I think.
It looks pretty good, but is not as pretty as a stripper, or a lapstrake. Most people looking at it will be blown away, but you'll know that if you had spent 500 hours, you could have built a truly beautiful boat using more traditional techniques.