The plan gives the offsets to lay out the side and bottom panels on the plywood. Full size drawings of the stem and stern are included to ensure alignment. I took a great deal of care over this stage, because small errors may be magnified at a later stage in the build. The 8ft X 4ft ply panels are butted up end to end, clamped using a couple of temporary wooden battens to hold the panels in place then marked with the component shapes.
I carefully support the panels whilst cutting because they are fairly fragile and can snap if left in an unsupported length.
Here you can see all the pieces after cutting and then joining. The Frames are laid on the top of the joined side and bottom panels. Note the plywood panels on the ladder sections that formed my building bench.
I used 3.6mm thick plywood butt straps about 75mm wide to join the panels. It is important to ensure that the panels are carefully aligned and assembled as handed pairs. If not, one side will have butt straps on the external faces on the outside! The joints were assembled using a 2-part marine glue which seems very expensive. I now think epoxy resin would have been just as good.
After the panels were joined and the glue set, they were clamped together and trimmed as pairs using a Surform, engineer’s file or small plane depending on the profile. This was followed by a careful sanding of the edges and then a roughening of the bonding surfaces where the 50mm glass tape was to be fitted.
